Architecture. (Gaming)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Monday, May 18, 2020, 14:56 (1650 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

So SCUMMVM works on Xbox? Playstation? iPhone?

Yes to all those actually. There are versions for iOS, PS2, PS3, and Xbox. Even PSVita and Switch.

So you are saying I can play PS games on a PS3? Or that you can play PS3 and PS2 games on PS4?
Because if it isn't the latter I don't know what the point is. I don't have the space to maintain multiple outdated consoles. If you can, that's great, but that is not something for the masses, it's a hobby. If the purpose of using physical media is so that you can play it forever as long as you keep the the hardware that SCUMMVM supports, assuming they also support it forever, I don't think the average joe is going to do that. Just because it's possible, doesn't mean it should be done.

I noticed on their wiki Xbox isn't supported. As for iPhone, the last supported is iOS 7?

Yeah, and that's because it does not really run on iOS, it runs on a modified (JAILBROKEN) iOS. Also "Supported" is going to be an odd word here. It's an open source project worked on by many people all with varying amounts of time, resources, definitions of what it means to support it, and comfort with violating copyright or hacking up an OS who have essentially forked and compiled it to work on a bunch of different platforms. An enormous amount of donated labor has been done by people because the like these games and want to have them work on modern platforms.

SCUMM is a common interpreter platform that Lucas Arts used for a bunch of games in the adventure/point and click era (modifying the platform with pretty much every game that used it) Calling SCUMM VM an emulator might be overstating it, but not by much. At the end of the day, to answer what you're getting at, you need to do a lot of the things you would need to do with an emulator to do the things Cody is saying you can do. More relevant to my point*, is the you will need to copy the game files OFF OF PHYSICAL MEDIA into a digital** format given that iOS, PS Vita, Nintendo Switch, etc. don't have drives that can read the original form of physical media.

Now that I spent a lot of time clarifying, the problem is none of this is relevant to the discussion. The argument here (which I agree with, BTW) is that DRM is bad for the future. I'm not sure why Cody persists saying "Digital" when he means DRM'd and "physical" when he meant DRM-free despite this obvious confusion and unnecessary disagreement it is causing, but it will smooth things along if you just do the translation in your head.

Meanwhile, you can't just see that it is on a disk and consider things safe forever. Archiving is a complicated and labor-intensive endeavor. Just saying "Physical solves" both hides potential risks and minimized the work people do to make old things still accessible. How valuable would those disks be if people had not made SCUMM VM? How valuable is my Mac-version Oni disk that I still have around here somewhere?

* Data is Data
** Because CD, DVD, and Floppy disks are not digital somehow?

P.S. I have most of these games still on old formats, and I have many devices with some version of SCUMMVM, and yet still I tend to go to my Xbox Live/Playstation Store versions when I want to play them because it's easier and they made MCC-ish "enhanced" versions of most of them which improve graphics or fix things that were probably a mistake like tank style controls. Also, I have a copy of Monkey Island 2 on my iPad that won't run because they didn't ever update the binary to be compatible. This is not a point against or for anything, but I think it's interesting and I'm glad I helped pay for someone to make great games easily available to people.