Here at FFG, ScummVM is our emulator of choice for running old adventure games. To be fair, Dosbox works fine too. I just prefer ScummVM since it has a built-in GUI; I never got around to finding one I like for DOSbox.

It’s been around for about sixteen years now. Originally developed to run Lucasarts adventures, over the years they added support for Sierra games, and a bunch of others too. They’ve recently announced the release of version 2.0, which adds yet more games to the list.

Perhaps most significantly, you can now use ScummVM to play the the 32 bit sierra games from the mid 90s. These was their last batch of classic point-and-click adventures; after that they lost interest as the genre faded away. The list includes King’s Quest VII, which was trying pretty hard to look like a Disney Movie. Police Quest 4 was pretty good, even if it ditched our favourite Sierra hero Sonny Bonds for the mean streets of LA. Meanwhile Leisure Suit Larry 7 was a bit cringeworthy.

Going back over a decade earlier, to the days when they were known as On-line systems, there’s also support for some of Sierra’s pre-King’s Quest games. These seem to be of the sort based around lots of static screens – it was of course KQ that brought in the innovation of a little character you could control. I wouldn’t want to spend much time on such primitive titles myself, but, they’re worth including just for the sake of preserving that little part of gaming history.

Moving away from Sierra, and jumping back to the 90s, there are a couple of titles incorporating first-person perspectives and FMV. We have support for Starship Titanic, written by Douglas Adams and RAMA, based on the scifi novel by Arthur C Clarke.

There’s been some other tinkering on graphics and sound, so go read the release notes for more information.