The mystery deepens! It’s time once again to step into Nancy’s shoes and follow the clues...

We are pleased to announce that ScummVM now supports two more titles from the long-running Nancy Drew adventure game series.

In Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel, Nancy is called to investigate a series of strange events at Captain’s Cove Amusement Park, where a carousel horse has vanished and rumors of a curse are beginning to spread. Is it sabotage, superstition, or something else entirely?

In Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island, Nancy heads to the Pacific Northwest to look into suspicious incidents involving a marine research facility and reports of aggressive orca behavior. However, things are rarely what they seem...

As usual, you will need the original game data files to play these games. The games are available for purchase through HeR Interactive’s website or Steam. To play them with ScummVM, you will need a daily development build.

If you encounter any issues, please submit a bug report to our issue tracker.

Stay curious, and happy sleuthing!

Three months have passed since the last release, and here we are again, with our new release approach. We are both worried and excited, but hope that in the current reality of the absence of pre-release testing, with more frequent releases, we will be able to deliver critical fixes faster.

Let's talk about the release scope. Three months have passed, but the amount of new features is very noticeable.

Newly Supported Games:

• Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness
• Crime Patrol
• Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
• The Last Bounty Hunter
• Mad Dog McCree
• Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold
• Space Pirates
• Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Besides these newly supported games, which come from two new engines, we improved PC Speaker emulation, support multiselect (with Shift/Ctrl keys) in the Launcher, made our internal Help system more noticeable by adding buttons “Help” to several dialogs, and made several improvements to make the lives of our GUI translation team easier.

Regarding improvements to specific engines and games, the notable changes are: music support to Atari ST releases of Elvira 1, Elvira 2, I, and MIDI music for Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu. After intensive testing, we improved the overall stability of Hodj'n'Podj, Might and Magic: Book One - Secret of the Inner Sanctum, Myst III: Exile, Pilots Brothers 3D and 3D-2, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo, Nathan's Second Chance, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, Discworld 1 and numerous WAGE engine-based games.

For the platform-specific fixes, Broken Sword 1 plays better on big-endian systems such as PS3, Wii, and OSXPPC. The Atari port has some handcrafted optimizations in the SCUMM engine. On iOS, we now support Text-to-Speech, and there is better support for external MIDI devices.

These are only the highlights of the release; the release notes contain the full list.

Since this is our first release in the new format, the number of ports ready on day one is limited. Please be patient with us when looking for your specific platform updates. You will find them on our downloads page. The iOS version Store and the Android versions should soon be available in their respective platform's app stores.

Yippee-ki-yay! The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for the DOS versions of the following titles created by American Laser Games:

• Crime Patrol
• Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
• The Last Bounty Hunter
• Mad Dog McCree
• Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold
• Space Pirates
• Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Grab your game CD (only DOS versions are supported currently), the daily build, shoot some baddies before they shoot you, and report any bugs you might encounter on your adventures.

Or, if you don’t have any of those games but still want in on the fun, try one of the demos available.

Before you start your test run, we encourage you to read through our testing guidelines, and please take some screenshots along the way.

And if the bunch of lawless villains always draw their six-shooters before you do, call the sheriff (or check the wiki page to find out how to cheat your way through).

Ancient evil stirs, the grim times approaching. And it's up to you, our brave investigator, to explore a haunted mansion and unravel the terrifying secrets of the Necronomicon before darkness consumes the world.

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce full support for Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness. This Cryo Interactive adventure from 2001 draws deep from the well of H.P. Lovecraft's works, casting players into creeping madness.

Grab your portion of the ScummVM daily build, prepare your copy of the game (or get it from Steam, roll up your sleeves, and dive into the unknown depths of this game.

And if you encounter any oddities (but not mishaps), please be kind to submit your bug report to our tracker.

Also, we are looking for some dedicated testers to help us complete development of another game on the same engine, The Cameron Files: The Secret at Loch Ness. We need someone who would repeatedly and patiently replay this game. If you are willing to help, please drop by our Discord Server and talk to the devs.

This year we are also coming with the good news: We've been accepted again to the Google Summer of Code program!

So, if you love Adventure games or RPGs and would like to spend your summer with our cool team, we look forward to your application and participation.

Fear not—we will provide enough handholding, explanations, and support if you can dedicate time to coding on our project, are an open-minded developer ready to learn, and do not hesitate to ask any questions. We've been doing GSoC for the last 19 years (can't believe it!), so we know the drill.

A list of suggested projects can be found on this page. If you have your own idea, we will gladly evaluate it. For example, this happened in 2023 with the Crab engine which is now fully supported. The required information for your application for our project is listed on our Wiki.

To give you a nice boost, we have put together an impressive amount of information on the Google Summer of Code miniportal. So you can learn all the ins and outs of the process. But indeed, you need to start by joining our Discord server and follow the #scummvm-gsoc channel where you can engage with our mentors and the rest of the team.

We are looking forward to your fine application and participation!