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  • ScummVM: Very belated 1.1.1 release for the GP2X Wiz

    While this is a little late to say the least (better late than never and all that, I mean it’s only 3 months late Surprised smile) I have finally managed to get my hands on a working GP2X Wiz, some all important free time and motivation, and built up and tested the GP2X Wiz backend for the 1.1.1 release following on from the official announcement.

    This post is also an announcement of the GP2X backend release as I forgot to post about it at the time despite the fact it got uploaded and released only a few days late ;) .

    I have not had a great deal of time recently to work on these releases so the backends are largely the same as the previous releases with just the needed changes to support all the fancy new things in the ScummVM core. No reworking of the control system or the like has been done yet (it’s still on my TODO).

    Some of the highlights of the changes 1.1.1 bring, that benefit the GP2X and GP2X Wiz, include 2 completely new engines and games, Dragon History (available free from here) and TeenAgent (available free from GOG.com). Also new is 16bit graphics support, which allowed us to add support for a whole bunch of newer Humongous Entertainment games for kids and improved support for the Amiga versions of Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia and Future Wars.

    Please provide feedback in the usual places on these releases and enjoy using them.

    Platform specific restrictions:

    Each of the releases has a small number of restrictions that have an affect on the games/engines you are able to use with each platform.

    GP2X: The biggest restriction with this platform is the overhead (and crudeness) of the downscaling when using 640*480 high resolution games on the 320*240 screen making such games perform poorly and look, well, bad.

    GP2X Wiz:  The downscaling support is a relatively recently added feature to the Wiz backend and while it looks a lot better than the GP2X, some issues still remain with high resolution games exhibiting ‘tearing’ when updating the screen under some circumstances.

    Unfortunately this seems to be an exhibit of the Wiz screen tearing bug and while efforts have been taken to minimise it in this release it the problem has not totally gone away.

    Providing feedback:

    If you would like me to consider a feature or fix a bug help me to help you by ensuring the reports end up recorded in official places.

    Downloads:

    What’s Next:

    Now I have the outstanding official 1.1.1 releases out of the way my plan is to get test releases from the main ScummVM trunk codebase featuring the ‘new’ SCI engine out as soon as I get time for the GP2X and Wiz, hopefully I will also be including support for the new GPH Caanoo at the same time.

    I also plan to update the OpenPandora release at the same time.

    Regards,

    John Willis

  • ScummVM: 1.0.0 “Shiny Logo” released for the GP2X and GP2XWiz

    This is just a quick post is to announce the 1.0.0 releases of the ScummVM for both the GP2X and the GP2X Wiz following on from the official announcement.

    Please provide feedback on these releases and enjoy using them, this is a huge milestone for the ScummVM project and we are all very proud of this release.

    New features since the 1.0.0 RC1 for my backends:

    Below are the main features and fixes added with this new release from the earlier RC1 release.

    Both releases feature additional ARM assembly optimised routines and tweaks to the build system along with a myriad of small ‘nips and tucks’.

    There are also further tweaks to refine the use of the “Return to Launcher” and “Global Main Menu” features (remember that Left Trigger and Select/Home/Menu will bring up the Global Main Menu in any game).

    This is in addition to the hundreds (litterally) of bug fixes that have gone into the core and game engines for this release from the ScummVM development team.

    Supported engines:

    Both releases feature support for all the game engines that are due to be included with the 1.0.0 release.

    This includes support for high resolution games.

    Specific restrictions:

    Each of the releases has a small number of restrictions that have an affect on the games/engines you are able to use with each platform.

    GP2X: The biggest restriction with this platform is the overhead of the scaling when using 640*480 games on the 320*240 screen making such game perform poorly.

    GP2X Wiz:  The downscaling support is a recently added feature to the Wiz backend and as such some issues still remain with high resolution games exhibiting ‘tearing’ when updating the screen under some circumstances. Unfortunately this seems to be an exhibit of the Wiz screen tearing bug and while efforts have been taken to minimise it in this release it the problem has not totally gone away.

    Providing feedback:

    If you would like me to consider a feature or fix a bug help me to help you by ensuring the reports end up recorded in official places.

    Downloads:

    Regards,

    John

  • ScummVM: 1.0.0 “Preview 2” for the GP2X and GP2X Wiz.

    This is just a quick post is to announce the “preview 2” test releases of the upcoming ScummVM 1.0.0 for both the GP2X and the GP2X Wiz.

    Note: Please don’t mirror or hotlink preview/test/alpha etc. releases or put them on download services but rather, direct people to this page. This helps me ensure that users always have the most recent versions.

    Please test and provide feedback on these releases as they will form the basis of the official 1.0.0 release candidate release for these platforms.

    New features since preview 1:

    Below are the main features and fixes added with this new release.

    Both releases feature additional ARM assembly optimised routines that offer performance increases in a number of games including “Sam and Max” and “The Curse of Monkey Island”. Both releases also feature tweaks to the default volume levels to cut down on sample clipping.

    There are also tweaks to refine the use of the “Return to Launcher” and “Global Main Menu” features (remember that Left Trigger and Select/Home/Menu will bring up the Global Main Menu in any game).

    GP2X: Lots of code cleanup and a few tweaks to lower memory usage. Disabling “Aspect Ratio Correction” now also works as expected rather then stretching the screen.

    GP2X Wiz: The biggest new feature is the addition of downscaling support using an optimised ARM assembly routine. This means the Wiz release now features support for the 64*4xx games such as Discworld 2, The Curse of Monkey Island etc. – It should also be mentioned that this seems to work well (better then I expected as I am not a fan of downscaling). Lots of my testers reported that the high resolution games are often extremely playable and look very nice on the Wiz’s OLED screen.

    There has also been substantial code clean up and fixes since the preview 1 release.

    Supported engines:

    Both releases feature support for all the game engines that are due to be included with the 1.0.0 release.

    This includes support for high resolution games.

    Specific restrictions:

    Each of the releases has a small number of restrictions that have an affect on the games/engines you are able to use with each platform.

    GP2X: The biggest restriction with this platform is the overhead of the scaling when using 640*480 games on the 320*240 screen making such game perform poorly.

    GP2X Wiz:  The downscaling support is a new feature to the Wiz backend and as such issues may still remain with some high resolution games. I have already spotted a minor issue where the screen is not totally cleaned when some types of screen movement occur.

    Providing feedback:

    If you would like me to consider a feature or fix a bug help me to help you by ensuring the reports end up recorded in official places.

    Note: Feature Requests for 1.0.0 are closed but any requests will be looked at for future releases.

    Downloads:

    Please ensure you download the correct version for your device.

    Extract the contents of the zip to a suitable folder on your SD card and launch “scummvm.gpe” to run.

    Review the README-GP2X for more information.

    Extract the contents of the zip to the game folder on your SD card, ensuring that you have a “scummvm.ini” in your game folder and the rest of ScummVM in a “scummvm” subfolder. Launch “ScummVM” from the main SD launcher menu to run.

    Review the README-GP2XWIZ for more information.

    Regards,

    John

  • ScummVM: 1.0.0 “Preview 1” for the GP2X and GP2X Wiz.

    NOTE: This post is now out of date, please see the most recent posts for more info.

    This is just a quick post is to announce the “preview 1” test releases of the upcoming ScummVM 1.0.0 for both the GP2X and the GP2X Wiz.

    Note: Please don’t mirror preview/test/alpha etc. releases or put them on download services but rather, direct people to this page. This helps me ensure that users always have the most recent versions.

    Please test and provide feedback on these releases as they will form the basis of the official 1.0.0 release for these platforms.

    New features:

    Both the GP2X and the GP2X Wiz backends benefit from some long overdue code cleanup and general TLC in this release. Where possible both backends are using common/similar code to aid in there long term maintenance.

    Both releases also now feature support for the ScummVM virtual keyboard. This can be accessed by holding the left trigger and pressing the right trigger (the old ‘0’ for Monkey Island 2 copy protection key combination).

    The ScummVM virtual keyboard works well but it’s feature set is still maturing. If you have virtual keyboard specific feedback I would welcome that. It should be noted that the virtual keyboard works independently of the game engine and the running game is paused when it is in use.

    GP2X Wiz: If you have used the early alpha releases for the GP2X Wiz then you will be pleasantly surprised, all the known issues with saving, OGG Vorbis playback and volume control have been resolved along with loads of other minor fixes.

    Supported engines:

    Both releases feature support for all the game engines that are due to be included with the 1.0.0 release.

    Specific restrictions:

    Each of the releases has a small number of restrictions that have an affect on the games/engines you are able to use with each platform.

    GP2X: The biggest restriction with this platform is pure performance (some audio can be choppy) and the overhead of the scaling code when using 640*480 games on the 320*240 screen.

    This renders high resolution games such as Discworld 2 totally unusable on the device and games such as Curse of Monkey Island, Touché and the Broken Sword games very slow (to the point of unplayable IMHO but others disagree).

    GP2X Wiz: Whilst the Wiz is a more powerful console then the GP2X on paper there are still a number of features lacking compared to it’s older sibling. The most noteworthy is the complete lack of any down-scaling support in this release.

    This means that any games that have graphics higher then > 320*240 will fail to function on this release. Most/all 320*240 or lower resolution games run very well at full or near full speed on the device.

    Providing feedback:

    If you would like me to consider a feature or fix a bug help me to help you by ensuring the reports end up recorded in official places.

    Note: Feature Requests for 1.0.0 are closed but any requests will be looked at for future releases.

    Downloads:

    Please ensure you download the correct version for your device.

    Extract the contents of the zip to a suitable folder on your SD card and launch “scummvm.gpe” to run.

    Review the README-GP2X for more information.

    Extract the contents of the zip to the game folder on your SD card, ensuring that you have a “scummvm.ini” in your game folder and the rest of ScummVM in a “scummvm” subfolder. Launch “ScummVM” from the main SD launcher menu to run.

    Review the README-GP2XWIZ for more information.

  • ScummVM: A quick and dirty alpha release for the GP2X Wiz.

    NOTE: This post is now out of date, please see the most recent posts for more info.

    As some people know I have been hacking around with the Wiz on and off for some time now (in addition to the Pandora) and while I got ScummVM running on the Wiz quite some time ago I have been holding off on a release so that I could get a little more time to fix issues with the Wiz backend.

    Well time has been rather cruel of late and I have not had as much time as I would like to clean up things and add funky features so rather then leave a half completed ScummVM backend languishing on my hard disk and rotting I decided to find a few hours to trim down the code, bring it up to date and put aside all the non working bits for now (mostly scaling support, OpenGLes parts, better controls, that sort of stuff) and get a ‘raw and ready’ ScummVM release out so people can start to give me feedback etc.

    This release is mostly untested and is built from mainline (HEAD) ScummVM revision 41101. Expect odd issues and things not to quite be working correctly yet. If your not happy with the odd crash and bit of unexpected behavior then this build is not for you.

    Anyway, onto what you get in this release and what you need to do to get it running.

    You can download the release here – Don’t forget to check the README-GP2XWIZ text file in the zip.

    As this is an early alpha release and is likely to get superseded quickly I would appreciate it if you did not mirror the download but rather pointed users back to this page.

    Once you have downloaded the release you need to extract the contents of the zip to the ‘game’ folder on your SD card. Once extracted you should have a ‘scummvm.ini’ file in the game folder and a separate ‘scummvm’ folder with all the actual files needed by the Wiz.

    Pop the SD card into your Wiz and select ScummVM from the SD games menu. If all goes well after a few seconds you should be greeted with the ScummVM game launcher. From this point it behaves very much like any other ScummVM release.

    Controls are very similar to the GP2X F200 release (including touchscreen support) with a few notable exceptions. Menu now brings up the game menu and Left trigger + Menu now brings up the global main menu for ScummVM.

    Other then that things pretty much match the layout of the GP2X F200 release. If you want to refresh yourself of the control mappings I have included full details in the README-GP2XWIZ text file in the zip.

    Known Issues:

    • No scaling support so only 320*xxx games run. Games that need a bigger screen then the Wiz will just crash ScummVM. Scaling support is on the TODO.
    • Save support may be erratic. Not quite sure of the cause yet but some of my testers had the odd issues with saves not writing correctly.
    • Speed. For most games speed is quite good but I have noticed a few points when performance really gets bad. Still looking into that.
    • OGG Vorbis support: One tester mentioned that games he used that had OGG Vorbis audio did not work. Still looking into that.

    Feedback on this release:

    The feedback avenues for the Wiz release are the same as the existing GP2X release.

    In order to help me keep track of requests, bugs etc. I am asking that people kindly report such issues to the correct places (or at least copy them there). I don’t spend all my time looking at forums and bug reports placed on random internet forums are never very helpful to me (i.e. they are very unlikely to get fixed or even read). The same applies to feature requests etc. etc.
    If you would like me to consider a feature or fix a bug help me to help you by ensuring the reports end up recorded in official places.

    Source Code:

    Source for this release will be up on a ScummVM patch tracker in the next few days (or, if the team view it as good enough, hopefully committed to SVN).

 

September 2010
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