[Scummvm-devel] Maniac Mansion in Day of the Tentacle support.

Torbjörn Andersson eriktorbjorn at telia.com
Thu Nov 19 19:01:08 CET 2009


Robert Megone <silver_coast at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I noticed we still have a big TODO regarding the Maniac Mansion in Day
> of the Tentacle support. Ive been speaking with Tobias and Eugene
> about this and thought it best to post to -devel to get some more
> opinions.

I'm not sure I understand everything in the mail, but the way I always
imagined that it could be implemented something like this:

1) Make a temporary savegame. There's a mechanism for this already - see
the SO_ROOM_SAVEGAME case in the "roomOps" opcode. (It appears in
several different versions of SCUMM.) However, I believe it doesn't make
a complete save state, e.g. it excludes music information. This may or
may not be what we want.

2) Make some kind of note about switching to a different game, and which
game to return to. Possibly using the config manager, and maybe some
special return code from the engine's run() function.

3) Quit the engine. That should get us all the way back to runGame(), or
maybe even scummvm_main().

4) Where it checks whether to quit or return to the launcher, it could
check for a game to switch to, and start that as if the user had
selected it from the launcher.

When quitting Maniac Mansion, it would have to do the same thing except
it would then also need to restore the savegame. But that should just be
a matter of setting the "save_slot" setting. That should hopefully put
everything back to the point where it called startManiac().

But this is just idle speculation. I haven't tried any of this for real.
(And I'm moving to another apartment next week, so I'm probably not
going to give ScummVM much thought for a few weeks.)

> A consideration is that to run Maniac Mansion through Day of the
> Tentacle we may need to either add it manually to the games list or
> implement some function which will detect Maniac Mansion data files
> under the MANIAC directory, underneath the Day of the Tentacle
> directory.

I think it would be fun if it started a game that had been added
manually, i.e. using a target name from the ScummVM config file. Then we
could make this target configurable and allow the user to put any
ScummVM-supported game on Ed's computer. Though maybe that's just silly.

Torbjörn Andersson




More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list