Hello everyone, I am Priyanshu Kumar and I will be porting the iBASS engine to ScummVM this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code. In this post, I will be covering a little background of this task and what exactly needs to be done.

By “porting”, we usually get an idea that it must be about an engine that needs to be ported and integrated to ScummVM in order to get the games based on that particular engine running through ScummVM. iBASS is not any different but still a lot different.

Sky engine is one of the oldest engines to be supported by ScummVM and the most popular game it powers is Beneath a Steel Sky. This engine was created by Revolution Software in 1994 and ported to ScummVM in 2003. Later, Revolution Software created a remastered version of the game in 2009 with enhanced UI controls for iOS which they built on top of ScummVM’s sky engine.

So, the goal of this project is to port(you may call it “backport”) the changes done for the remastered version and integrate them with ScummVM’s Sky engine to make the remastered version(iBASS) playable on ScummVM. The efforts have already been started and in the next post, I will be briefing about the progress.

Thanks for reading.

Hello everyone! My name is Andy and I’m a 2nd-year Computer Science student. I am incredibly excited to announce that I will be participating in Google Summer of Code 2026 with ScummVM!

I am deeply drawn to ScummVM because of its core mission of digital preservation, coupled with my deep passion for retro gaming. For this summer, my project is titled “Finishing implementation of incomplete engines”. The ultimate goal is to push three nearly-finished ScummVM engines over the finish line, ensuring they are stable and ready for official ScummVM releases.

Currently, these engines face various challenges, ranging from incomplete low-level graphics and legacy code structures to unresolved gameplay bugs.

I am looking forward to diving deep into the codebase and sharing my progress, technical challenges, and bug-hunting stories right here.

Stay tuned for more updates, and let the coding begin!

A couple of weeks ago, we silently crossed an important milestone for the ScummVM project; a milestone we are very proud of.

According to repository analysis performed by Open Hub, ScummVM’s code base now contains more than 5 Million Lines of Code, crafted by more than 900 contributors over almost 25 years.

Dear contributors, on behalf of the entire ScummVM community: Thousands of people are using your code every day, reliving their childhood memories or exploring stories they have yet to discover.

Your passion and endurance are what makes this possible. You are not only writing history, you are preserving it.

Thank you!

This year again, we had the privilege to receive many impressive proposals, and Google gave us the opportunity to mentor 4 of them for the GSoC this summer.

• Ion Andrei Cristian and Mohit Bankar will both be working on helping to finish incomplete engines from our backlog, leading to yet more games being supported and helping with our preservation efforts.

• Priyanshu Kumar will port the iBASS engine to ScummVM. This engine was written by Revolution Software in order to release Beneath a Steel Sky with enhanced controls and features on iOS, and the upgrades to the engine will be incorporated into ScummVM to benefit all platforms.

• Ramyak Sharma will be dedicating his summer to focus on the DIRECTOR engine, bringing more features and compatibility to the Macromedia Director preservation effort, and enhancing its Visual Debugger.

Please give them all a warm welcome and feel free to visit our Discord server to discuss their projects.

The community bonding period starts today, and the coding period will follow, starting on the 25th of May. You can expect regular updates on their respective blogs on Planet.

With the four GSoC students on board, the team is already in a Summer of Coding state of mind — we hope you’re joining us in the countdown!

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank everybody that applied to GSoc with us, and hope you are interested in helping us continue to build and grow the project going forwards as well.

The mystery deepens! It’s time once again to step into Nancy’s shoes and follow the clues...

We are pleased to announce that ScummVM now supports two more titles from the long-running Nancy Drew adventure game series.

In Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel, Nancy is called to investigate a series of strange events at Captain’s Cove Amusement Park, where a carousel horse has vanished and rumors of a curse are beginning to spread. Is it sabotage, superstition, or something else entirely?

In Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island, Nancy heads to the Pacific Northwest to look into suspicious incidents involving a marine research facility and reports of aggressive orca behavior. However, things are rarely what they seem...

As usual, you will need the original game data files to play these games. The games are available for purchase through HeR Interactive’s website or Steam. To play them with ScummVM, you will need a daily development build.

If you encounter any issues, please submit a bug report to our issue tracker.

Stay curious, and happy sleuthing!

Three months have passed since the last release, and here we are again, with our new release approach. We are both worried and excited, but hope that in the current reality of the absence of pre-release testing, with more frequent releases, we will be able to deliver critical fixes faster.

Let's talk about the release scope. Three months have passed, but the amount of new features is very noticeable.

Newly Supported Games:

• Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness
• Crime Patrol
• Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
• The Last Bounty Hunter
• Mad Dog McCree
• Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold
• Space Pirates
• Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Besides these newly supported games, which come from two new engines, we improved PC Speaker emulation, support multiselect (with Shift/Ctrl keys) in the Launcher, made our internal Help system more noticeable by adding buttons “Help” to several dialogs, and made several improvements to make the lives of our GUI translation team easier.

Regarding improvements to specific engines and games, the notable changes are: music support to Atari ST releases of Elvira 1, Elvira 2, I, and MIDI music for Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu. After intensive testing, we improved the overall stability of Hodj'n'Podj, Might and Magic: Book One - Secret of the Inner Sanctum, Myst III: Exile, Pilots Brothers 3D and 3D-2, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo, Nathan's Second Chance, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, Discworld 1 and numerous WAGE engine-based games.

For the platform-specific fixes, Broken Sword 1 plays better on big-endian systems such as PS3, Wii, and OSXPPC. The Atari port has some handcrafted optimizations in the SCUMM engine. On iOS, we now support Text-to-Speech, and there is better support for external MIDI devices.

These are only the highlights of the release; the release notes contain the full list.

Since this is our first release in the new format, the number of ports ready on day one is limited. Please be patient with us when looking for your specific platform updates. You will find them on our downloads page. The iOS version Store and the Android versions should soon be available in their respective platform's app stores.

Yippee-ki-yay! The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for the DOS versions of the following titles created by American Laser Games:

• Crime Patrol
• Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
• The Last Bounty Hunter
• Mad Dog McCree
• Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold
• Space Pirates
• Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Grab your game CD (only DOS versions are supported currently), the daily build, shoot some baddies before they shoot you, and report any bugs you might encounter on your adventures.

Or, if you don’t have any of those games but still want in on the fun, try one of the demos available.

Before you start your test run, we encourage you to read through our testing guidelines, and please take some screenshots along the way.

And if the bunch of lawless villains always draw their six-shooters before you do, call the sheriff (or check the wiki page to find out how to cheat your way through).

Ancient evil stirs, the grim times approaching. And it's up to you, our brave investigator, to explore a haunted mansion and unravel the terrifying secrets of the Necronomicon before darkness consumes the world.

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce full support for Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness. This Cryo Interactive adventure from 2001 draws deep from the well of H.P. Lovecraft's works, casting players into creeping madness.

Grab your portion of the ScummVM daily build, prepare your copy of the game (or get it from Steam, roll up your sleeves, and dive into the unknown depths of this game.

And if you encounter any oddities (but not mishaps), please be kind to submit your bug report to our tracker.

Also, we are looking for some dedicated testers to help us complete development of another game on the same engine, The Cameron Files: The Secret at Loch Ness. We need someone who would repeatedly and patiently replay this game. If you are willing to help, please drop by our Discord Server and talk to the devs.

This year we are also coming with the good news: We've been accepted again to the Google Summer of Code program!

So, if you love Adventure games or RPGs and would like to spend your summer with our cool team, we look forward to your application and participation.

Fear not—we will provide enough handholding, explanations, and support if you can dedicate time to coding on our project, are an open-minded developer ready to learn, and do not hesitate to ask any questions. We've been doing GSoC for the last 19 years (can't believe it!), so we know the drill.

A list of suggested projects can be found on this page. If you have your own idea, we will gladly evaluate it. For example, this happened in 2023 with the Crab engine which is now fully supported. The required information for your application for our project is listed on our Wiki.

To give you a nice boost, we have put together an impressive amount of information on the Google Summer of Code miniportal. So you can learn all the ins and outs of the process. But indeed, you need to start by joining our Discord server and follow the #scummvm-gsoc channel where you can engage with our mentors and the rest of the team.

We are looking forward to your fine application and participation!

Another year has gone by, therefore we are releasing a new ScummVM version. As you may notice right away, we are changing our version numbering schema, but that’s not all! We are also planning on more frequent releases!, which you can read about on sev’s blog.

This could be the biggest release we have made so far in terms of the added features and engines. If I count correctly, we have added 12 new engines to our compatibility page. Not games, engines. In terms of games, it is challenging to count, since two of the engines, SLUDGE and WAGE are authoring tools, but if you count games in our detection tables, that adds up to at least 194 titles.

Newly Supported Games:

• Dark Seed
• God of Thunder
• The Adventures of Willy Beamish
• Heart of China
• Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand
• Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake
• Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu
• Little Longnose
• Pilot Brothers 3: Back Side of the Earth
• Pilot Brothers 3D. The Case of Garden Pests
• Pilot Brothers 3D-2. Kennel Club Secrets
• Features of National Fishing
• Mom Don't Worry
• Dog-n-cat: In the Footsteps of Unprecedented Beasts
• Dog-n-cat: Island of Dr Ratiarty
• Out of this World (Another World)
• SLUDGE-based games
• Adibou 2: Nature & Sciences
• WAGE-based games
• Penumbra: Overture
• Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum
• Mort&Phil: A Movie Adventure (Special Edition)
• Trick or Treat
• Hodj 'n' Podj
• The Last Express And probably various other games…

Apart from the games and engines, two very noticeable features are the massive improvement of Keymapper and Text-to-Speech. We ran a successful Google Summer of Code last year - Ellen Moon (ellen) worked on TTS and Aun Noman (Prime) added keymapper support to a huge amount of games. TTS is currently limited to desktops (Win/Lin/Mac), but we are working on support on the mobile platforms.

As usual, we have added support for more localizations - we love them! We also squashed a number of nasty bugs - we do not love them so much.

Engines and Games Improvements

The Private Eye engine got a major sound subsystem update, in addition to support for external subtitles. The SCUMM engine had a significant overhaul, and it now supports the original in-game GUI for DOS, Macintosh and Windows. The Humongous Entertainment subengine was fully revisited with practically impeccable compatibility, thanks to the efforts of Bosca. The Stark engine for The Longest Journey now has much better compatibility with graphics cards. The Wintermute engine is undergoing a complete code review with the game compatibility improving daily. Last but not least, the ZVision engine, running Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor has acquired widescreen support, better sound, and better panorama rendering, upgrading your game experience to a new level all thanks to the work of Thomas N McEwan, who joined our team last year.

Platforms

On the subject of platform support, we now optionally support building with SDL3, support scaling shaders for 3D games, and significant upgrades for the Android, iOS and Atari ports.

The full release notes contain a comprehensive summary of the changes and enhancements.

On our downloads page, you can find the downloads for various platforms. The iOS version is available in the Apple App Store and the Android versions should soon be available in the Google Play Store. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpak packages, the automatic updater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2026.1.0.

A final point, if you encounter any unrecognized SLUDGE or WAGE engine games which we are not currently aware of, please let us know. You can either do this by filing a bug at bugs.scummvm.org or by chatting to us on Discord at https://discord.gg/4cDsMNtcpG. Happy gaming!