ScummVM is a game engine recreation that allows many old games, from “The Secret of Monkey Island” to “Myst,” to run on modern devices without emulation or compatibility layers. ScummVM 2.8 has been released with support for new games and game engines, online multiplayer support, and more.

The ScummVM project just released version 2.8, nicknamed “Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets,” which includes support for five more legacy game engines and support for 50 more published games. The new additions include “Muppet Treasure Island,” the macOS versions of “Syberia” and “Syberia II,” “Stranga” and Cloak and Dagger’s AGS games, and several Nancy Drew games.

This release also includes a rewritten version for RetroArch, allowing ScummVM games to be more easily opened and played through the RetroArch emulator frontend. The blog post explains, “We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though.”

ScummVM 2.8 has initial support for online multiplayer, based on work by the Backyard Sports Online project. It’s now possible to play “Backyard Football”, “Backyard Baseball 2001,” and “Backyard Football 2002” with other people over the internet, and support for Moonbase Commander is in the works. It’s always exciting to see online multiplayer return to old games — the Dolphin emulator for Wii and GameCube games has been improving online multiplayer over the past few years, which also includes support for games that were originally only designed for local multiplayer.

There are many smaller improvements in this release as well. There are many fixes for the Ultima series, the sound code for all Humongous Entertainment games has been “completely rewritten,” and many translations have been updated.

You can download ScummVM for Windows, desktop Linux platforms, macOS, Android, iOS (through sideloading), Haiku, AmigaOS 4, and RISC OS. It’s also available as Homebrew software for various game consoles, like the Dreamcast and Nintendo Switch.

Source: ScummVM Blog, ScummVM Release Notes