[Scummvm-devel] Joining the Director team

[Scott Percival]

Hi ScummVM,

My name is Scott, and I'm applying to join the Director engine team.

I got interested in Director after contributing to a Kickstarter in 2014 for preserving the works of Theresa Duncan. You can see the results at https://sites.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms - basically a VNC client connected to an AWS VM emulating MacOS 7. It's an impressive feat, but it's barely playable if you aren't in the same country as the data center, and even with on-demand resource allocation the hosting costs do not scale. 

Director seems like a pretty good target to push for, especially given how popular the engine was. Like the Theresa Duncan CDROMs, a lot of important works will never be re-released due to the ancient format, or lost source material, or the dealbreaker of emulating a copyrighted OS. Easiest way to clear all those barriers is by adding support to ScummVM.

So far I've been working on Lingo bytecode support for Director 4 and 5, with the initial goal of getting Chop Suey (https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/chop-suey) to run. I also intend to document my experiences so that it might be useful for other potential contributors.

About myself! I live in Perth, Western Australia; years and years ago I happened to run into Ender at his day job and asked a bunch of nerdy questions about ResidualVM. During the week I'm a software engineer, on Saturdays I am an instructor for Perth Parkour, and most of the other time I work on various reverse engineering projects. You can see other things I'm working on at my site https://moral.net.au, or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/moralrecordings

Cheers,
Scott