DC: BUILD: Always disable SCUMMv7+ on Dreamcast (Bug#6008) #4693
Conversation
With the recent v7/v8 changes in the SCUMM engine, trying to run a v7/v8 SCUMM game is not a nice user experience anymore, because the game just won't fit in the limited default memory available on Dreamcast anymore. This is also a problem for some other engines on this platform, but the SCUMM engine being one of the most popular engines, quite a lot of users end up burning a toast CD-R on their Dreamcast until they figure out that only SCUMMv6 and earlier still work nowadays (with some limitations too). Disabling v7/v8 from the SCUMM engine plugin should also free up some memory for a better experience with earlier SCUMM titles.
|
The memory issues with SCUMM v7/v8 have a long history and I honestly I don't think they ever worked very well. Which is a bit annoying because IIRC at least the v7 games had a memory requirement of 8 MB on DOS, so they should be playable on a 16 MB machine, but I guess it is what it is... So I agree with prioritising v6 and earlier if there is a tradeoff to be made. It would still be possible to re-enable v7/8 support with --enable-engine=scumm_7_8 if someone really wants to, correct? |
|
Thank you! |
dwatteau
deleted the
feat/dreamcast-always-disable-scumm-v7-v8-for-better-user-experience
branch
Yes, I agree. Optimizing this can be added to the SCUMM TODOs (and some other engines could benefit from such optimization goals as well) but unless someone shows up with a particular interest in improving this, it's probably better to disable what's known not to work, IMO.
Unfortunately, in the way Another solution would be to hardcode |
3 participants
See Trac#6008 for some context.
With the recent v7/v8 changes in the SCUMM engine, trying to run a v7/v8 SCUMM game is not a nice user experience anymore, because the game just won't fit in the limited default memory available on Dreamcast.
This is also a problem for some other engines on this platform, but the SCUMM engine being one of the most popular engines, quite a lot of users end up burning a toast CD-R on their Dreamcast until they figure out that only SCUMMv6 and earlier still work nowadays (with some limitations, too). Disabling v7/v8 from the SCUMM engine plugin should also free up some memory for a better experience with earlier SCUMM titles (from a quick test,
scumm.plggets ~15% smaller).This PR hardcodes this behavior into
configureso that we're sure thatscumm-7-8is never enabled there. I'm doing this there (and not in dockerized-bb) because AFAIK the Dreamcast release builds are not made from the buildbot. A nicer solution (as discussed on Discord) would be to have a way to know about "capabilities" (or something similar) between backends and engines, but this PR is mainly meant as a quick fix for the 2.7.0 release.@zeldin: Do you agree with this approach? SCUMM v7/v8 has been limited on DC for years, and it's been confirmed to be useless recently, and we have no immediate fix for this, so for end-users I think this is fair.
Please DON'T MERGE unless @zeldin is OK with it. Thanks.