[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Finally, there is only one native Windows Mobile port of the games emulated by ScummVM; that of Broken Sword. However, even with that, in cases, you will want to prefer playing the original version under ScummVM than the native one (as opposed to the general rule of native apps / games being far better than emulated / interpreted ones). I’ll elaborate on this later, in a separate section.

(Note that as far as the recently added Sierra AGI support is concerned, there's no SCI support, albeit there's talk of integrating the FreeSCI engine HERE. See the above-linked article for more info on running Sierra SCI games on Windows Mobile. Also note that PocketSarien automatically skips the age verification system in LSL1; ScummVM doesn’t. As it’s not possible to press Alt-X, unless you are ready to jot down the right answers, you may want to prefer PocketSarien to play this game. Speaking of passing initial code entering, if you get into problems with Monkey 2, you’ll want to read THIS and THIS).

1.2 The Tutorial: Downloading, installing and playing games

In this entire 1.2 section, I explain what you can play, whether it’s worth playing, where you can download / get the games from and, finally, how you can play them.

Note that, in here, I will also frequently refer to three important, additional documentation (in addition to the ScummVM Wiki pages). The most important of them is SirDave's PocketScumm Manual in the WindowsCE forum of ScummVM. The two other files are in the distribution ZIP file of ScummVM, in the Doc subdirectory. In there, ‘README’ contains generic and ‘README-WinCE.txt’ contains Windows Mobile-related information.

I recommend reading all these three documents (in any order) to get a full picture of ScummVM. However, in here, I also present you a self-sufficient tutorial, should you find reading all the linked tutorials and manuals far too overwhelming (I would) - it will suffice in most cases. It's only with, say, extracting CD audio tracks and ripping / compressing CD-only games that you will REALLY need to consult the other documents; most importantly, SirDave's tutorial.

First, what games are playable?

A LOT – and not just Lucasfilm games, but from a lot of other software companies. As has already been stated, you will want to check out THIS page for the list of supported games.

Even VGA games (Touche, Broken Sword etc) are playable – on VGA Pocket PC’s, using high-resolution VGA. These games even run on QVGA Windows Mobile devices, with downscaled, resized graphics – with some zoom-in capabilities to magnify the upper and lower half of the screen to make text more readable. I’ll elaborate on scaling issues later.

1.2.1 What about Broken Sword, the only old game having a native PPC port?

ScummVM may even be better at emulating an old title than native games for Windows Mobile. Take, for example, Broken Sword, the only game that has been natively ported to the Pocket PC.

The emulated version of Broken Sword is, generally, superior to the native one when played on a VGA device, particularly in the following respects:

much better music and sound: much higher sampling frequency, no compression effects and, at times (for example, the sound of the wind right at the start of the game), stereo.

Much lower CPU usage (~17% as opposed to ~42% on a 624 MHz device) and, therefore, better battery life

It has somewhat lower memory requirements

In this case, shouldn't you have the original Broken Sword disks but if you still want to prefer it over the native PPC port, I recommend buying the latter. Then, you hit two birds with one stone. First, you support continued native Windows Mobile development by supporting the company that ported Broken Sword, AstraWare. Second, then, you will have the right to get the PC version of Broken Sword off, say, Bittorrent for free - if you only have one version installed at a time, you can righfully use a version originally written for another platform.

You will, however, want to stick to the native Windows Mobile version if:

you have a QVGA device and you MUST read the text at the bottom of the screen. Then, the native port is the way to go – just compare THIS QVGA screenshot of the native version to that of the emulated game running on a QVGA device. Zooming only partially helps the bad readibility of the latter as can be seen in HERE.

you need the additional, really useful “Tool” functionality of the native WM version, which is an excellent way to combat the lack of a “free look” mode (see THIS with enabled tools; also see THIS “What's Free Look is for?” thread).

1.2.2 Downloading / getting games

While it’s pretty hard to find these old games in shops, most of them can be found on eBay. Also see THIS thread for more info.

Of course, you can also download them pretty easily from abandonware sites (which I will NOT link) or different torrents. It is illegal in most cases, though; and, with several games, you’ll also run into copy protection problems you won’t find a solution to. An example of them is Future Wars, which asks for copy protection codes at start; they aren’t available anywhere, as is also explained HERE.

Note that the official ‘Extras’ download page of ScummVM has two full games ('Beneath a Steel Sky' and 'Flight of the Amazon Queen'). You may want to start with them.

1.2.2.1 Source platform considerations - what version should you use?

ScummVM is not only able to make use of MS-DOS data files, but also those initially created for other platforms: Amigas, Atari ST's, Commodore 64's, NES'es, Acorns.

Unfortunately, these data files are, in cases, vastly inferior to the MS-DOS versions, particularly color depth-wise. A typical Amiga game uses 32 colors and is, therefore, visually much less appealing than a 256-color MS-DOS version.

Furthermore, you will need to do some manual work to extract the files from these versions. If you have the original machine and you have a way to transfer them (via, say, some kind of a networking connection), you can do this from the operating system of the given platform. If, on the othe rhand, you don't have these, you will need to turn to various disk and ROM image file extractor tools to do the trick as the C64 / Atari / Amiga / NES games are mostly distributed as .D64 / .AMS / .ADF / .NES disk/ROM images, respectively, and ScummVM isn't able to parse these disk/ROM images.

To extract the needed data files from these files, you'll need the various disk image extractor tools in the Tools package available for a separate download HERE. As you most probably won't want to use them (again and again, try preferring the MS-DOS or the FM Towns versions because of, at least, the superior graphics), I don't provide a full tutorial to using them.

Note that as far as the Commodore 64 version of Zak version is concerned (Maniac doesn’t work per the documenation), the version accessible at c64.com isn’t recognized (with side A being disk1 and B disk2) and the data file extractor doesn’t find anything. This means you may encounter incompatibility issues like this with other games too.