[Scummvm-devel] Kyra engine memory requirements

[Neil Millstone]

Hi all,

I've been trying to get Kyra 1 running on the DS port and have run into 
a few problems.

If you look at Engines/Kyra/Resource.cpp it loads the entire pak file 
into RAM in order to generate an index from it the first file it indexes 
is over 5Mb and is obviously a problem on a machine with 4Mb of RAM.  
This seems unnecessary and I'm pretty sure I can change it to index the 
file by seeking around within it.

Does anyone mind if I go ahead and change this?

The second issue I have is the dirty one of deleting savegames.  When 
using a GBA flashcart there is only 64Kb of space to save games, which 
doesn't get you many of them.  Currently in ScummVM there is no real way 
of deleting save games.  I can list the files and ask the user which one 
to delete, which works for SCUMM engine games (although you can't see 
the name of the save), but games like BASS store an index of the saves 
that exist so it's not exactly clear how I can delete a game cleanly.  
Since each engine has a different process for this, it needs to be 
integrated into the engine.

What would be great, is if each engine had a function to list the names 
of the saves, and another function to delete one.  The front-end screen 
to do this could be up to the individual backend, or perhaps integrated 
into the launcher.

I had a discussion with others in the ScummVM IRC channel a while ago, 
and they seemed to be in agreement.

- Neil