[Scummvm-devel] Sierra SCI games

[Max Horn]

Am 24.01.2008 um 11:32 schrieb Kari Salminen:

>   Hi,
>
>>> I am curious, is anyone working on Sierra SCI games support?
>>> - Martin Lindhe
>
>   Looking at jvprat's wiki-page at
> http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User:Jvprat
> it seems he's working on trying to integrate FreeSCI as
> a ScummVM engine. Not sure of the politics behind this
> move though, you should probably ask him about how
> it's going and how people in both projects (FreeSCI and
> ScummVM) feel about it.

Well, this *is* a touchy subject, for various reasons:  In  
particular, one may want to read:
<http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=1979>
<http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=4048>
(and probably many more relevant threads in the forums ;-).

In short: There is an existing project for supporting SCI, we know  
the folks on it, and they know tons about SCI. We do *not* want to  
alienate them, but for various reasons, it does indeed seem that  
there might be some benefit in pooling resources. But only if there's  
a cooperation -- a "hostile takeover" of FreeSCI wouldn't be very  
helpful to anybody.

Note that FreeSCI does clean room reverse engineering only, for legal  
reasons, while we use disassemblers a lot. So there is a fundamental  
difference there. While we usually are much quicker in enhancing  
support for a given engine, we also have to worry a lot more about  
legal problems, and that is not acceptable to everybody. This is  
another reason why this subject is somewhat touchy.

What jvprat is doing is at this point (in my eyes) a big experiment:  
To prove that it's possible to run the FreeSCI "engine" atop the  
ScummVM backends, while keeping the engine part mostly identical to  
what the regular FreeSCI version uses.

So, Martin, if you are interested in SCI, you may want to work with  
the FreeSCI team to improve their SCI code, or with jvprat to improve  
the FreeSCI-in-ScummVM code, or both.


Cheers,
Max