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ScummVM on the App Store

apps.apple.com

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#131
post #89
post #5

Interesting. My 5 year old sons favourite app on his Android tablet is ScummVM. I bought all the Putt Putt, Freddy Fish, and Spy Fox games on Steam, and after copying the data files over to ScummVM on Android, my son has been enjoying them a lot. I'd much prefer him spending his time with these rather than these toxic mobile games that target young kids with repetitive loops locked behind countdown timers and in app…

Those games are infinitely better than anything I could find in the app store, and the whole collection was (is?) $50.

Currently around that price indeed on Steam Sale, and lower if you only look for Spy Fox bundle or Put Put or whatever you want. Very nice.

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locked downness is a non issue coming from a previous android fanboy. iOS is just superior in every way. No I don’t care that you can change some font on your android phone.

Can you specify some examples of how "iOS is just superior in every way"?

Smoothness

Security

Updates for even ancient phones

Massively integrated ecosystem

Higher quality apps, even googles own

Best hardware

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#133
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is very weird with how they interpret that part of their rules. iSH is allowed but not iDOS, etc.

iSH has compiled the binaries for arm64 so they actually run natively. When they do a syscall to malloc they are actually doing a syscall to malloc. iDOS is interpreting the bytecode and wrapping the unavailable things with its own implementation. When a DOS application runs malloc, the memory is assigned by iDOS instead. I’m not saying Apple is consistent, but your example doesn’t show that well.

False. iSH is an x86 "bytecode" emulator.

"Possibly the most interesting thing I wrote as part of iSH is the JIT. It's not actually a JIT since it doesn't target machine code. Instead it generates an array of pointers to functions called gadgets, and each gadget ends with a tailcall to the next function; like the threaded code technique used by some Forth interpreters."

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#134

How’d this get past app review? Apple has allowed zero emulators of any type on the App Store. I bet this gets crushed.

ScummVM explicitly denies being any kind of emulator. It doesn't run the original source code of the games. Rather, it's a complete rewrite of the game that uses the original assets (images, sounds, internal scripts, etc.)

[deleted]

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to sign all the necessary NDAs and to port them to 64 bit, newer iOS versions and devices for free.

If they got depreciated once, it's gonna happen again. Apple should invest in Microsoft-tier backwards compatibility if they want to avoid publishers abandoning their software.

I suspect Apple considers developers ignoring a five(?) year notice period that 32 bit compatibility will be dropped a sign that the publisher has already abandoned their software.

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#136
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which app do you use for comics?

Yeah, I was gonna plug it since it’s great, but didn’t have it on my phone (it’s iPad only, which makes sense) and forgot the name. Looks like it’s Chunky: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chunky-comic-reader/id66356762...

Chunky is good, you have multiple ways to import content, even straight from calibre.

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#137
post #56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who still hasn't seen the new Indiana Jones movie, but is thinking about it some time: Go play Fate of Atlantis instead.

I’ve always wondered why they didn’t use the Fate of Atlantis script instead of the awful crystal skull

I’ve often pondered this and I have concluded that there are a number of factors:

1. Licensing. While it might appear that the Indiana Jones IP is fully in the hands of Disney, it’s plausible that there are nuances behind the scenes. For example, Paramount owns the distribution rights to the first four films. That’s a different issue, but I mention it as an example of how rights can become fragmented over time over multiple contracts. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the rights to Fate of Atlantis are more complex than we see from the outside. Having said that, I’ve no evidence of this.

2. It was a good game, but does that make for a good movie? FoA had some great game features: multiple paths, fun puzzles, classic adventure game exploration and interactivity, awesome pixel art - but none of these are useful to a movie.

3. The script was… OK. It doesn’t have any standout quotable lines like the first three films did. Its comedy is more slapstick than witty, and there are more than a few video-game in-jokes. It’s also highly derivative, written, I suspect, to make players think “This is cinematic! This is just like a real Indiana Jones movie!” To that end, it worked brilliantly. But in the 90s, games were still a sideshow compared to Hollywood, and were written in a parodic style, not yet having found their own space as a unique medium. To an extent, this is still true today.

4. An aging Harrison Ford is tough to reconcile with a story set in the 1930s. I expect this alone was a big driver in the studio wanting new scripts set in the 50s and 60s for the last two films.

5. Movies based on games have an abysmal track record, and I’m sure Hollywood producers get an allergic reaction whenever someone suggests another one.

And yet, despite all the above, FoA is still fantastic raw material for a movie. The plot, mythology, locations, set-pieces, and even the music, are all perfect for being reimagined on the big screen. Which leads me to the final reason why I think it hasn’t happened:

5. Nobody took games seriously in the 90s, Lucas was in control in the 00s for Crystal Skull and wanted his own story not somebody else’s, Disney was distracted by Star Wars and Marvel in the 10s, and by the time we get to Dial of Destiny in the 20s, Disney has become so risk averse that the idea of pulling ideas from a video game seems far outside what they are creatively capable of. Sadly, with Dial of Destiny bombing, the franchise is probably dead until the 30s.

Still, the fact that Disney lawyers shut down the recent fan-remastered version of the FoA game gives me hope that they still recognize how much value that IP has. They’ve strip-mined every other IP, so it’s possible they will eventually realize they've been digging in the wrong place, let go of Harrison Ford (in either live, de-aged, or posthumous generative form), and get their top men working on it.

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#138
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC’s doing fine. It’s how our kids watch movies on road trips (download to iPad from Jellyfin’s web interface, play in VLC). Almost every book I’ve read in Books is from libgen. Download, open-in, and it’s on all my devices. Reading progress syncs and everything. The best electronic comic book experience I’ve seen is from a free app (optional one-off IAP that does nothing—I wish it had higher tiers, the author is do…

Which app do you use for comics?

Check out iComics by Tim Oliver. It works really well

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#139

This reminded me of the fact that excellent remasters of monkey island were released on the iPhone (and a few other paltforms) but were removed from the App Store after a few years. It’s a shame, they had great new artwork and sound/music but you could switch back and forth with the old art and it was cool to see the difference in each scene.

Sadly, the developer never updated them for compatibility with 64-bit-only versions of iOS (iOS 11+).

This is an example of the value provided by ScummVM, it means that fans are able to keep playing the games without having to deal with rightsholders who don’t want to maintain them.

Re: ScummVM on the App Store

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they got depreciated once, it's gonna happen again. Apple should invest in Microsoft-tier backwards compatibility if they want to avoid publishers abandoning their software.

That was never Apple's thing. Apple always changes things as it pleases and expects the developers to suck it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Not sure if you linked the wrong video, but the one you linked to barely supports your comment.

Setting aside that abandoning OpenDoc turned out to be the right call, I see a dude trying to get a rise out of Jobs and Jobs handling it in a very respectful way, going as far as admitting they make mistakes and that he is flawed, but that ultimately the decisions are made with the end user (and sales) in mind and less with what kind of nifty technology is behind it.

Specifically on the matter of 32-bit support, not dropping it would’ve meant not being able to make the leaps forward that they were able to make, which led to a better user experience.

From the developer side of things, as a developer for Apple platforms, it’s a silly discussion to begin with because in 99% of the cases it just meant recompiling it against the latest SDK.

So I have no lost love for devs that couldn’t be arsed, even ignoring the fact that the entire ecosystem is known for rapid improvements and continuous maintenance. In fact that’s what most indie devs love about it.

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