ScummVM 2.5 “Twenty years ago today”
ScummVM is an outstanding project. Originally an interpreter for the LucasArts SCUMM engine games, it has now seemingly become effectively a centralised home for assorted open source game engine reimplementations.<p>I sometimes like to say that the Linux kernel is the world's largest collection of open source drivers, with a decent kernel attached; ScummVM is like that for old video game engines.<p>Really, this is an incredibly valuable thing not just in practical terms for enabling people to play these games on different systems and with open source code, but as I see it this is a significant culture and heritage preservation effort too. Having these open source reimplementations ensures these games remain available to future generations.<p>I also think it's pretty interesting to consider just how many of these engines had to be completely reverse engineered, and the time investment that implies. The effort to develop the engine in the first place probably took multiple people much effort when these games were first developed, and those programmers were paid; reverse engineering is harder and requires more effort and tenacity, and yet we still see a seeming overabundance of fully-functional complete reimplementations.<p>One of the things I find fascinating about this is how the original programmers effectively cause the creation of the subsequent project, and their design decisions determine how successful that project is. The reimplementation project is like a weird "echo" through history, echoing off the original engine, caused by it yet done by wholly separate people, who are reduced to piecing through the original binaries like some act of software archeology, yet are motivated to do so by the merits of the original game. In other words, suppose you wrote a random engine for a company many decades ago, complete with assorted warts, retrospectively questionable design decisions, and kludges that were ultimately put in just to ship on time. It must be pretty weird to find, <i>decades later</i>, that random hobbyists have rebuilt every piece of that architecture, painstakingly replicating every aspect of the original architecture, reproducing it as some verbatim gospel, even if it was something you barely put any thought into at the time.