ScummVM

There are those of us whose hearts tremble at titles like "Full Throttle", "Monkey Island", and "King's Quest".

There are also those who occasionally wipe the dust off their shelves and fall into nostalgic reverie, having discovered a long-forgotten collection of old games. However, they all will most likely end up with an enormous disappointment if they do decide to give these games a try once again - either their newer system will not support them, or there simply will be too little time to enjoy a full-length adventure game. ScummVM can be a solution to these problems.

ScummVM is a program that combines many newly-rewritten engines of old point&click games and is capable of interacting with those games' resource files directly, bypassing original scripts. Thus it enables you to run these games on many platforms, even those where they were never intended to run. You can play your favourite quests windowed or full screen on a brand-new Windows, Mac OS or Linux; you may even upload them into your iPhone or PSP and enjoy playing outdoors. Because ScummVM provides rewritten engines for the old games, it becomes possible to use various video filters to smoothen overpixelised graphics, or compress some resource files - or even use soundfonts to make the MIDI music sound more like an orchestra. Note, that this program does not emulate a separate system to run the games, and therefore its performance greatly surpasses that of DosBox or Wine etc.

The list of implemented engines (quite imposing already) grows continuously as the team of developers contacts original authors of adventure games and gets their source codes - among others, for example, support for "Discworld" series is being added.