April 1st, THE INTERNET: The [FreeSCI](http://freesci.org/), [Sarien](http://sarien.sourceforge.net/) and [ScummVM](http://www.scummvm.org/) teams today announced the formation of CABAL (Coalesced 'Adventures beyond Architecture' League), a universal adventure game interpreter. This new project will unite the strengths and capabilities of the projects involved, creating what the project members believe will be a revolution for adventure game fans around the globe. When asked about the relevance of CABAL for the worldwide adventure gaming market, ScummVM project lead Max Horn commented that "\[with\] the market for adventure titles waning, we believe that the formation of a project with the explicit goal of running every adventure game ever released will infuse it with new life." FreeSCI maintainer Lars Skovlund added that "this will certainly cause an upheaval in the gaming world. Adventure game fans around the world, rejoice!". In addition to supporting LucasArts' SCUMM games (including famous titles such as "Monkey Island", "Indiana Jones" and "Sam and Max"), Sierra's SCI and AGI lines ("King's Quest", "Leisure Suit Larry", "Space Quest"...), and other games already supported by the retrospective engines, the newly united team plans to continue to add further titles to their already impressive list. Some of the juicy new modules include: *An Infocom module (based on the [Frotz Z-machine interpreter](http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~dgriffi/proj/frotz/)), so you can now play your favorite text adventures anywhere you go! *[Exult](http://exult.sourceforge.net) is being merged in as a plugin, allowing Ultima 7 fans around the world to play their favorite game on the many platforms already supported by the CABAL component engines - including Palm/PocketPC PDAs and the Dreamcast. *Revolution software has offered the source-code for Broken Sword 3, which will be added to the titles supported by the upcoming CABAL3D project - alongside with Grim Fandango and, possibly, Ultima IX (negotiations are ongoing). *Support for the SNES games Final Fantasy IV through VI (Japanese numbering, i.e. FF2/FF3 according to US releases) is planned for sometime this Fall. Whilst these are not strictly adventure games, the storyline and plots in this series are more imaginative than any 'action adventure' title published in recent years. Offers by various companies, including Microsoft and Amiga International, to buy out the team have been gently but firmly declined by the leads of the joint project. "We know that we could earn a lot of money from this, but we are idealists and at this time we have the goal to reform the worlds adventure market. Once that is achieved, we can reconsider about making some money out of this."
CABAL team splits over fundamental design issues After yesterdays ground-breaking announcement, we are sad to announce the immediate disbandment of the CABAL team. Over the last several days there has been heated debate regarding several important design issues, and current tension in the team has risen to an insurmountable level. "It's really unfortunate", Max Horn, senior developer on ScummVM and Exult, was quoted as saying, "but \[former FreeSCI maintainer\] Christoph \[Reichenbach\]'s ideas of aligning curly braces with the left-hand side of function declarations while appending them to the end of the line for 'while' and 'for' loops did not make any sense at all." The latter replied by pointing out that "using anything but tabs for indentation is calling for trouble." Claudio Matsuoka, of the Sarien project, pointed out his disappointment and noted that he didn't see much of a point in trying to co-operate with people entirely incapable of reaching agreements on such trivial issues. "I mean, we haven't even resolved the entire EMACS vs. vi dispute, and they're already at each other's throats again." James Brown, another senior developer on the ScummVM project, sadly announced that he was laughed out of the project meer hours before a decision to split was made. "They just said I didn't belong, since I prefer nano as a editor..." he admitted.
This is just a quick update to let everybody know we're still alive. Work on ScummVM is progressing as per usual, and we intend to release ScummVM 0.6.1 shortly. ScummVM 0.6.1 will contain several bugfixes for various games, as well as several sound and music enhancements for later SCUMM games (Full Throttle, The Dig, Curse of Monkey Island). Also, followers of CVS may have noticed that support for Another World was recently added. This provoked quite a bit of argument within the ScummVM team as to whether this is considered an adventure and within ScummVMs goals. After much debate, the engine author (cyx) decided that it would be more convenient to continue the project seperate from ScummVM. It has now been removed, and future information and development will occur as part of the [RAW](http://membres.lycos.fr/cyxdown/raw/) project. To prevent any doomsday predictions, I should also point out that he remains a member of the ScummVM team.
ScummVM 0.6.1 is out, and can now be grabbed from our download page! Among the usual changes, ScummVM should now run natively on 64-bit machines -- something we actually forgot to mention in the NEWS file. And you know what they say: "To save the world, you have to push a few old ladies down the stairs." So we made a mother-load of fixes in this release. Some of the wonderful things you will no LONGER see in ScummVM include: *Glitches using an Ogg Vorbis talkie file in some games *Crashes on 64-bit machines *Crashes when saving to an invalid directory in Broken Sword 1 *Lots of sound glitches in Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and The Dig *Crashes in some international versions of Simon the Sorcerer *... and lots of other annoying bugs! So don't delay, download today. Downloads are not yet available for all supported ports, such as non-ARM PocketPCs and the HandheldPC binaries. These should become available within the next week.
Well, one of those "Small Yet Important" coding mistakes has cropped up in ScummVM 0.6.1. A copy-and-paste error in the 'Edit Game' screen may result in people not being able to save a game. The mistake involves the new 'Paths' tab, which allows for easier editing of game paths. Unfortunately, the 'Extra Path' field on this screen is accidentally saved as directory to use for saved games, instead of correct field below it. This was noticed and fixed in the experimental CVS version, but the fix was mistakenly left out of the ScummVM 0.6.1 release. If you encounter this glitch, the recommended work around is to set the Extra Path to the saved game directory. ScummVM 0.6.1b will be released soon to correct this issue.
ScummVM version 0.6.1b was released today, fixing some very annoying regressions we discovered in its predecessor, 0.6.1. Everybody is strongly recommended to update to this version And now... have some fun, folks!
Well, this is just to let you know we are not dead. There has been some amazing work happening in the last few weeks - with ScummVMs support for the HE SCUMM games improving in rapid bursts thanks to the combined talent of cyx, Kirben and Sev. And of course, there has been more development than just this. And now we would like to bring up the point that our side-projects Residual and ScummEX both need developers and contributors. We welcome patches from other programmers very much. With the help of ScummVM developers joostp and aquadran, salty-horse (a regular #scummvm'er) today submitted a patch for lipsync animations in Residual. Please see our 'subprojects' page and the 'Coding Guidelines' in our Documentation section. If you are interested in persuing a particular problem, please e-mail the "-devel" mailing list or pop on IRC if you need advice or help.
Hello, humble Website Watchers. We have gathered you all here today for a contest of most epic proportions. Well, not really. We're holding a contest to redesign the ScummVM website. If you have talent, and want to contribute something to ScummVM, here is your chance. **Rules** *Designs should be submitted in Photoshop (.PSD) or GIMP (.XCF) format. Layers should be used, and consideration taken that the majority of the design is feasibly done in HTML with minimal use of large graphical elements. *The completed design must be designed for optimal use at 1024x768, but the page should be designed to be renderable in lower resolutions and in text-only browsers. *The main focus should be on an easy, noticeable and uncrowded navigation system. *Sites submitted with a completed HTML template will be considered for extra points if they obey the following extra rules. Otherwise they will be graded on design merits only. *Completed sites should be submitted as a one-page HTML template. All original graphics should be included (layered if applicable) in Photoshop .PSD or GIMP .XCF format. *Sites must have readable HTML/CSS code, and should be quick-loading and as 'light' as possible. *Sites should be W3C HTML4.01 verified, and have no particular browser dependencies. Submissions close on the 21st of October, and public voting will occur after the team has selected the final candidates. There will be a prize or two of some sort for the winner, which will be announced at a later date. Please e-mail all submissions to contest@scummvm.org in a .zip, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 archive.
Greetings fellow adventurers! Just a reminder that the submission deadline for the Website Revamp contest is here in just ten days! The very first submission was just received, so if you have yet to even start, time is running out. The prizes will be announced as soon as somebody gets back to me since certain sites news posts suggest he hasn't forgotten :)
Anybody wishing to enter the Website Revamp contest better get their entries in, only two days left! So far we have only five entries. Thats not too bad, but I was hoping for at least another five more. So if your still sitting on an entry, SEND IT IN! Please send all contest entries to [contest@scummvm.org](mailto:contest@scummvm.org). Further information on this contest is available a couple of posts down.
