Attention all classic DOS gamers... ScummVM

To the older members on Listal, we'd all agree the golden age of PC Gaming occured in the 1987-1993 DOS era, a time when Sierra and LucasArts adventure games rules supreme.

If you're aching to re-live the adventures, or are from the younger generation but want to check out the games, you'll quickly notice very few if any will work on modern XP system. You'd have to almost make a separate DOS partition or DOS VM environment, load hard-to-find drivers for your sound cards, for your mouse, for your video card, and make sure enough emm386 memory was available. Oh the joy!

well fear not. An open-source project called ScummVM allows you to play many of the top adventure DOS hits on any new XP system.

website: ScummVM.org

Custom list: Games Supported by ScummVM
(ScummVM team add more each month)

It's called ScummVM because it was first designed to emulate the Scumm engine from LucasArts games, but has since emulated many Sierra AGI games as well as other game engines as well. They are only working on DOS adventure games though, or the point-n-click or text parser style.


Enjoy!

I cannot believe this, I literally threw several of these games into my bin yesterday! They're on the 'sold out range' and didn't work on my comp....but luckily they were only in my waste paper bin and have been rescued. I owe you Big P.

no prob, Lil G. :)

which ones do you have?

p.s. many on the list are listed as abandonware, and some have even been released as freeware by the game's creators (Beneath Steel Sky and Flight of Amazon are two that went that route) so I will update the list to show links to freeware/abandonware, if they exist.

I have the Monkey Islands and the Broken Swords. I tried to play 'LeChucks Revenge' yesterday and it wasnt working. Theme Hospital doesnt work either come to think of it and I love that game.

scummVM is only targeting Adventure games, but for other DOS games, you can check out DOSBox

p.s. i'm playing Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis thru ScummVM. works like charm, and ScummVM also has options to up-scale the resolution by 'guessing' pixels. looks very nice, much nicer than playing at default 320x200 resolution. Stretching the game to 800x600 makes even the ugly polygon graphics rather enjoyable.

I love anything that lets me play/improve on my old games...I have Gold Rush aswell come to think of it, in a box somewhere with all my old Amiga games. I only found out recently how you could download old Sega and Nintendo games onto the Wii...like finding Aladin's cave.

I'm trying to go way back into my brain to re-discover all my old-school games:

www.listal.com/list/favorite-dos-games

Tom, how come you didnt have this site available back in 1990?? slacker :)

I'll have to go thru that list later and re-rate them accordingly. Now, all I do is 'oh! I remember that game! it was awesome!!' and give it a 10/10. :) almost like a narutard train of thought to my DOS game ratings.

These sound fx and music used to be top notch on my AdLib
www.listal.com/video/3157817

Yeah haha, I do that to. Thats the thing do you rank it according to how good it was at the time/comparitive to other games of the era, or over all time? At the moment I do the first. Its amazing how you remember, I had a game, I think it was called 'Log Cabin' that I was obsessed with as a youngen. Had to build a log cabin by solving maths puzzles; I think it involved frogs.

Did you custom add all of those games on your DOS list?

if you search the term with amazon.com, it will *usually* find it, but with no platform set, and then I rename it. But thats more for the big DOS titles. I've had to add quite a few manually as well.