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11. Interpreters
11.1. SCUMM Engine (LucasArts)
Lucasarts wrote an engine for point and click adventures named SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). They wrote many graphical adventures using SCUMM, like their famous Monkey Island series (all three). Ludvig Strigeus <strigeus@users.sourceforge.net> was able to reverse engineer the SCUMM format and write an interpreter for SCUMM based games that compiles under Linux and Win32 named scummvm <http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/>. Their website is very good, and chock full of any kind of information about SCUMM and playing these games under scummvm.
A compatibility page is maintained at the scummvm website. FWIW, I've been able to finish many of the games that are listed as 90% done with no problems. scummvm is rock solid, and allows you to purchase SCUMM based Lucas Arts games, copy the data files to your hard drive and play them under Linux. As of February 2002, I've been following their cvs, and this project is undergoing constant development. Kudos to the scummvm team.
11.2. AGI: Adventure Gaming Interface (Sierra)
The older Sierra DOS graphical adventure games used a scripting language named AGI (Adventure Gaming Interface). Some examples of games written in AGI would be Leisure Suit Larry I (EGA), Space Quest I and II, King's Quest II, Mixed-Up Mother Goose and others. These games can be played using sarien <sarien.sourceforge.net>, an open source interpreter for AGI games.
Sarien was written in SDL, so it should run on any platform that can compile SDL programs. In addition, there are versions for DOS, Strong-Arm based pda's, QNS (holy cow! embedded gaming!), MIPS based systems and SH3/4 based Pocket PC's. The developers are clearly out of their minds (in a good way!). Sarien also has numerous enhancements not found in the original games, like a Quake style pull-down console, picture and dictionary viewer, enhanced sound and support for AGDS, a Russian AGI clone. Sarien is under development and the developers have been very good about documenting the Sarien internals if anyone wants to get involved in hacking it.
11.3. SCI: SCript Interpreter or Sierra Creative Interpreter (Sierra)
The newer Sierra graphical adventure games (we're talking about the late 80's here) used an interpreter named SCI. There were many versions of SCI since Sierra was constantly improving its engine. The original SCI games were DOS based, but Sierra eventually started releasing Win32 SCI based games. Some examples of games written with SCI are Leisure Suit Larry 1 (VGA), Leisure Suit Larry 2-7, Space Quest 3-6, King's Quest 4-6, Quest For Glory 1-4 and many others. Compared with AGI games, SCI adventures have better music support, a more complex engine and loads of bells and whistles.
Many SCI based games (games written in SCI0) can be played using freesci, available at freesci.linuxgames.com. Like Sarien, FreeSCI has many graphics targets including SDL, xlib and GGI, so this game can compile and run under an incredible number of platforms. The developers have done a fantastic job of documenting and FAQing their application.
11.6. Ultima 7 (Origin, Electronic Arts)
Ultima 7 is actually 2 games: part I (The Black Gate) and part II (Serpent Island) which uses a slightly enhanced version of The Black Gate's engine. In addition, an addon disk was released to both part I (The Forge Of Virtue) and part II (The Silver Seed).
A team of people developed Exult <http://exult.sourceforge.net/> which is an open source interpreter that will run both parts of Ultima 7 and their addon disks. Exult is written in C++ using SDL, so it will compile on any platform that can compile SDL programs. It also features some enhancements over the original versions of the Ultima VII engine. You'll need to purchase a copy of Ultima 7 to play. The developers have no plans on extending Exult to interpret the other Ultimas since the engines changed so radically between releases.
The Exult team has also been hard at work creating a map editor, Exult Studio, and a script compiler that will let users create their own RPG in the Ultima style.