This year again, we had the privilege to receive many impressive proposals, and Google gave us the opportunity to mentor 4 of them for the GSoC this summer.

• Ion Andrei Cristian and Mohit Bankar will both be working on helping to finish incomplete engines from our backlog, leading to yet more games being supported and helping with our preservation efforts.

• Priyanshu Kumar will port the iBASS engine to ScummVM. This engine was written by Revolution Software in order to release Beneath a Steel Sky with enhanced controls and features on iOS, and the upgrades to the engine will be incorporated into ScummVM to benefit all platforms.

• Ramyak Sharma will be dedicating his summer to focus on the DIRECTOR engine, bringing more features and compatibility to the Macromedia Director preservation effort, and enhancing its Visual Debugger.

Please give them all a warm welcome and feel free to visit our Discord server to discuss their projects.

The community bonding period starts today, and the coding period will follow, starting on the 25th of May. You can expect regular updates on their respective blogs on Planet.

With the four GSoC students on board, the team is already in a Summer of Coding state of mind — we hope you’re joining us in the countdown!

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank everybody that applied to GSoc with us, and hope you are interested in helping us continue to build and grow the project going forwards as well.

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.