[Scummvm-devel] Sierra SCI games

[Martin Lindhe]

PS. Sorry for answering privately to some of the mails here,
instead to the mailing list. I am used to mailing lists
setting the

Reply-To: mailinglist at address

header, which is not the case on this list.



Max Horn wrote:
  > 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 ;-).

Thanks for the links, i've now read the threads and understand
the issues better. I will reconsider this and look a bit more
on FreeSCI. But I am still curious of starting a new SCI engine
from scratch, rather than porting FreeSCI over to ScummVM.
However I need to think that over some first.

> 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.

Yes I agree completely on that point. I guess it would be easier
to go in that direction however, if the FreeSCI project was dead,
which it appears not to be currently.

> 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.

I understand that one aswell, i just read Lars Skovlunds (FreeSCI dev)
comments of the issue on the scummvm forum.

Then perhaps a native SCI implementation would be the easier path
to go.

> 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.

Well I am interested in working on ScummVM, and SCI seems like a big
black hole in ScummVM support right now, so that was my orginal query.

However I need to look some more on the FreeSCI status and so on.
But I think I would be more interested in starting from scratch, on a
ScummVM engine for SCI.

Best regards
Martin Lindhe