Get ready to jam and slap da BASS!

Yes, it is this time of the year again! Please welcome the first ScummVM release of the year: ScummVM 2.9.1.

This maintenance release mainly focused on fixing bugs that our developers and users have uncovered since our last stable release.

As usual, several engines and platforms received their fair share of bug fixes and improvements: AGI, AGS, Asylum, BAGEL, Bladerunner, Hopkins, MADS, NGI, SCI, SCUMM, Sky, Sword1, Tetraedge, Tinsel, Tucker, TwinE, and TWP.

Our porters also went on a bug-hunting spree, so all we can provide is a small summary of the latest and greatest fixes!

The Nintendo 3DS (yes, we do not care about end-of-life dates!) has the GUI appropriately displayed if it is configured to use the top screen only.

Android now provides an option to save and restore your configuration file and save games, and the vast majority of older Android devices will see increased performance thanks to the ARM NEON optimizations, which are now enabled by default. And the Beneath a Steel Sky game is not crashing in the intro anymore!

The Atari port received some internal backend, GUI, and audio fixes. Speaking of audio: iOS/iPad will now always properly recognize FluidSynth soundfonts, macOS has support for Audio CD playback from original discs on Snow Leopard and earlier, and Windows 9x (yes, EOL…) can use FLAC files again!

The detailed list of improvements is available here.

Head over to our downloads page and grab it while it’s hot! As usual, macOS and Windows users can update ScummVM with our integrated, magical auto-upgrade solution.

Robert Ripley, a famous traveler and collector of rarities. One day, during a trip in Egypt, Ripley is attacked by mysterious Chinese assassins. The trail will lead him and his Chinese girlfriend Mei Chen on a chase around the world, in a race against time to prevent the greatest theft of all time, the First Emperor's seal, which could plunge the world into chaos.

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce full support for Ripley's Believe It Or Not! The Secret of Master Lu, the other classic game, besides Orion Burger, by Sanctuary Woods. As with Orion Burger, it adds a few niceties that the original didn't have, such as mouse wheel handling, and using the spacebar to skip walk animations.

Help us test the game by grabbing a daily build. Read through our testing guidelines. The game's logic was all hardcoded, and proved even more complicated than that of Orion Burger, so we really need people to try all sorts of weird actions, and make sure the game handles everything correctly and matches the original implementation. And please take some screenshots along the way.

Good luck. If you fail to prevent the seal falling into evil hands, it could be used to unite all Asia under a single ruler, thirsty for conquest.

Are you ready for more sleuthing with everyone’s favorite teenage detective? We’re excited to announce that Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand and Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake are now ready for public testing! Furthermore, it's now possible to enable the ScummVM save/load screens instead of the original ones, to take advantage of additional features when saving or loading.

In Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Nancy takes on the role of an intern at a Washington D.C. museum, where a mysterious theft sets off a series of clues leading deep into the secrets of ancient Maya artifacts.

In Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Nancy finds herself investigating a haunted cabin surrounded by eerie howls and ghostly canine apparitions.

The games are available for purchase through HeR Interactive’s website or Steam. Or if you already own a CD copy of the games, their English and Russian variants will also work. To play them with ScummVM, you will need a daily development build. As always, if you encounter any issues, please submit a bug report to our issue tracker.

This is yet another exciting year for the ScummVM project as we have five GSoC contributors joining the project this summer.

• Ellen Moon will be continuing work on adding Text-to-Speech to more engines. This will increase accessibility for those games that were missing voice-overs. This task will be presented on Ellen's GSoC blog.

• Aun Noman (known as Prime) will, at the same time, be adding Keymapper to the remaining engines. Only about 45% of ScummVM-supported engines have this feature. The current list can be found on our Wiki. And the relevant task blog will eventually be hosted at Aun's GSoC blog

• Malhar Badve (aka SuperLemon) is our Director contributor for this year. He has already added more improvements to QTVR, but our overall hope for this year is to add movie saving capability, which is required by many titles. You will be able to follow the progress for this task on Malhar’s GSoC blog.

• Shivang Nagta will pick up work on a system for verifying game file integrity, validating their checksums against those present in a central database. It will also let users contribute the checksums of game files not on the database. You can follow the progress for this task on Shivang’s GSoC blog.

• Alikhan Balpykov will help us with completing the qdEngine implementation this year. You can follow the progress for this task on Alikhan GSoC blog.

Please give them a warm welcome, and visit our Discord server if you want to discuss those projects. After a four week Community Bounding period, the coding period will start on June 2, and you can expect regular updates on these projects on their respective blogs. The team is very excited about the upcoming summer – and we hope you are as well.

We are excited to announce the classic Dynamix adventure games The Adventures of Willy Beamish and Heart of China are now ready for testing in ScummVM!

As the titular Willy Beamish, you play a 9-year-old troublemaker from Frumpton, USA. All you want to do is play Nintari and hang out with your friends, but your parents keep giving you so many chores... and even when you get them done, larger and more sinister forces are at work in your small town. A kid can't get a break!

In Heart of China, you start as retired WWI pilot Jake "Lucky" Masters. After a run-in with Hong Kong businessman E.A. Lomax, you feel driven by a strong sense of duty (and your massive debts!) to help him track down his kidnapped daughter. Work your way through a branching plot and the opportunity to play as three different characters to solve the puzzles and get Kate home.

Along with the previously announced Rise of the Dragon, these games complete Dynamix's short series of adventure games using the DGDS engine.

To test these games, you’ll need a DOS version of the game (both are available from GOG) and a daily development build. Be sure to check the notes on the wiki for each game, and please report any bugs on our issue tracker.