CABAL has come true
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 11:28 pm
That's right. CABAL, the April Fools joke has come true. ScummVM has merged in FreeSCI. Though it won't appear in the ScummVM Subversion until after the release of the next stable version of the interpreter, 0.13.0. Don't look to ScummVM as a replacement for DOSBox for some time, though. FreeSCI Is the open source project to develop a modern portable third party interpreter for the Sierra SCI games, much as ScummVM is for the LucasArts games. Development of FreeSCI has been much slower than ScummVM, as SCI is a more complex engine than Scumm and the project has had fewer resources given to it.
As with the absorption of Sarien for AGI support, it will inherit the flaws of as well as support. As noted by MusicallyInspired in another thread, ScummVM has bad sound support for the AGI games. DOSBox and NAGI have truer sound for the AGI games. Another problem is that FreeSCI only supports SCI0 games, with very limited support for SCI1 and SCI1.1 games via an experimental developmental branch and no support for SCI32, so no VGA games for the foreseeable future.
What it might eventually mean, though is support for the Windows only SCI games and the ones that the Windows version was better (King's Quest VI, anyone) will be playable on any modern OS without emulation and will remain so as long as ScummVM and SDL is developed.
As with the absorption of Sarien for AGI support, it will inherit the flaws of as well as support. As noted by MusicallyInspired in another thread, ScummVM has bad sound support for the AGI games. DOSBox and NAGI have truer sound for the AGI games. Another problem is that FreeSCI only supports SCI0 games, with very limited support for SCI1 and SCI1.1 games via an experimental developmental branch and no support for SCI32, so no VGA games for the foreseeable future.
What it might eventually mean, though is support for the Windows only SCI games and the ones that the Windows version was better (King's Quest VI, anyone) will be playable on any modern OS without emulation and will remain so as long as ScummVM and SDL is developed.