ATMcashpoint

Update: I mentioned on the ScummVM bug tracker that I would prefer it if ScummVM emulated the original, possibly buggy Mac font spacing in Indy 3, and eriktorbjorn very graciously agreed to see if it could be done as an option. That sort of incredible generosity reminds me that ScummVM is indeed a labor of love. My hat is off to him.

The release notes for the new ScummVM release point out there's more support for the high-resolution Macintosh fonts in games like Last Crusade and LOOM - if it was there already in daily builds I must have missed it, but as a Mac gamer back in the day I quite appreciate it. And after I filed a bug report they put in the moveable Practice box in the LOOM Macintosh port, which is quite excellent! On the other hand, the Mac high-res fonts on some screens in Last Crusade (eg, the Grail Diary pages) are not pixel perfect in ScummVM, and the comments on the bug ticket say they have no intention of making them be so, because the original implementation of the font kerning "looks bugged" apparently. Maybe? But I do wish accuracy to the original interpreter was a goal ScummVM strove for all the time, rather than picking and choosing.

There was an Alt-F5 option to use the original Save/Load GUIs (though not the Game Paused bars etc.) in SCUMM games rather than the ScummVM default, but it's been broken for one to two years now. (And it was already inferior to the fancy "use original Save/Load GUI" checkbox in the startup menu for Sierra games, but I'm digressing.) On Discord a while back Sev said it was probably just a bug that hadn't been fixed. However, it's been languishing in the bug list for over a year now without anybody bothering to fix it. Honestly, most of the bug fixes and feature improvements to ScummVM are now happening on the Sierra side. The LucasArts games are treated as basically "done", even when there are still significant improvements that could be made, or even just notable bugs like the one above that are left unfixed.

Not to mention that current daily builds of ScummVM on Windows default to an OpenGL rendering mode where you have no way whatsoever to simply take a 320x200 resolution game and upscale it to 2X, 3X, etc. with the window fitted to match. Instead it resizes the game screen by default into a very large and distorted resolution, around 1152x864. And the only way to resize the game window is through the extremely imprecise method of using Windows' resize function to make it into something vaguely near the resolution you want. So you either get horrible pixel stretching, with stuff like the pixelated cursors no longer fitting 1:1 on the background art - along with very noticeable letterboxing/windowboxing if you try to resize it - or (if you use the "Center" option in the launcher graphics settings) a tiny 1x window swallowed up in a void of black. Apparently the way to change this (as I just figured out after some frustrated tinkering) is to go into the launcher options and select "SDL Surface" as the render mode rather than OpenGL, which allows you to have game windows with pixel-perfect scaling. But the result is that the default presentation of LucasArts games in current ScummVM builds looks absolutely atrocious. I don't get at all why this is the default, and there isn't really any explanation in the launcher to help people find the better rendering options.

I mentioned it in a #monkey-meetings chat on Discord a couple months ago and was told by Sev that it was a bug and I should file a bug report. Which I duly did, only to have it closed a couple days later because it was a duplicate of a (still-open) bug ticket that was already a year old at that point.

NB: I'm having trouble getting a password-recovery email for my usual account (the problem seems likely to be on my email server's end) so I'm using this backup I created when the forums first came back online and the recovery of ancient accounts had issues. - ATMachine ScummVM used to have an Alt-F5 hotkey that would bring up the original Save/Load menu. This has stopped working in current builds (including one I just downloaded today). This means, for instance, that you can't see the "enable 3D acceleration" joke in the CMI menu. So in at least one case actual game content is being lost as a result. ScummVM's implementation of Sierra SCI and AGI games has a check-box option in the launcher menu to enable the original Save/Load GUI. Even when Alt+F5 worked, ScummVM never had anything so intuitive or easy to use for SCUMM games - it was always relegated to an obscure keyboard command, which now doesn't even work. It's a clear example of the way SCUMM support has lagged behind games from Sierra etc. in the last few years. I'm glad to see other people besides me are taking an interest in this stuff.