ScummVM

Debian’s scummvm, unpatched. It runs each of these games from its original data: the free ones from Debian’s packages, the others from your own copy, which Walnut Games makes into a package. Every game has its own menu entry that starts it directly, fullscreen, with the pad as the mouse; ScummVM’s own launcher stays in the menu for everything else.

Technical notes

Debian’s scummvm, unpatched (2026.4.0+dfsg-1 on the PS3 in the smoke runs of 2026-10-29; 2026.1.0 before). The licence is GPL-3.0-or-later: the sources’ headers since ScummVM 2.7 (Debian’s copyright file still says GPL-2+ for most files). Each game it runs is a GameDB entry of its own (the user, 2026-10-30: “we don’t rate engines, we rate games”); the old scummvm bundle is a draft that keeps ScummVM’s own launcher and the smoke-test recipe.

How a game starts

Every game has its own menu entries in its bundle’s desktop/launchers/, and nothing goes through ScummVM’s launcher or its Add Game:

ps3-game sh -c "mkdir -p ~/.config/scummvm/walnut && exec scummvm -c ~/.config/scummvm/walnut/<target>.ini
    -i /usr/share/ps3-games/scummvm/<target>.ini -p <the data folder> <target>"

• Through ps3-game: game mode from the first frame. Before this, the player started ScummVM’s launcher and pointed Add Game at the files; game mode froze the desktop, and Add Game’s file dialog (the desktop’s own, gui_browser_native) opened inside the frozen desktop and hung (2026-10-29).
• A config file per game (-c), so a played session sets aside only that game’s settings and saves (its rating/test.toml), never the player’s other games. -i is the game’s initial config, shipped by ps3-games-integration from the bundle’s desktop/files/usr/share/ps3-games/scummvm/<target>.ini: ScummVM reads it only while the -c file doesn’t exist, then writes the player’s settings there.
• The console defaults in it: fullscreen=true, stretch_mode=fit (the 4:3 picture between bars at 1920x1080), gui_browser_native=false (ScummVM’s own file browser wherever one opens: the global menu’s save and load don’t need one, its options’ paths do), confirm_exit=false, gui_return_to_launcher_at_exit=false (quitting the game quits ScummVM), subtitles on, music_driver=adlib and output_rate=22050 (the AdLib emulation at half rate: cheap on the PPE, as in the smoke runs; there is no MIDI device). The pad is the mouse by ScummVM’s own default (joystick_num 0: the stick moves the pointer, the face buttons click); the smoke runs’ logs say “Using game controller: PS3 Controller”.
• A target per game in that file ([tentacle] with gameid and engineid): ScummVM keeps the settings of a target it finds in its config, but not of one it makes from a bare game id, and the bare id atlantis is ambiguous (“Unrecognized game ‘atlantis’”: another engine has a game of that id; the smoke run needed --auto-detect). -p gives the folder for this run only.
• One entry per edition and language for the player’s own games: game-data-packager makes one package per edition (dayofthetentacle-floppy-es-data), each in its own folder (/usr/share/games/dayofthetentacle-floppy-es/). Each entry has NoDisplay=true and X-Walnut-Requires= its folder’s main file, so ps3-game-menu shows the ones whose data is installed, all named after the game. The free games have one entry each, with their Debian package’s folder (/usr/share/scummvm/<game>/); their own menu entries are diverted.

ScummVM’s own launcher stays in the menu for games Walnut has no entry for: the scummvm draft bundle’s scummvm.desktop replaces Debian’s org.scummvm.scummvm.desktop (diverted), runs with PS3_GAME_MODE=off (ps3-game-detect leaves it alone) and X-Walnut-GameMode=false (ps3-game-menu doesn’t wrap it in ps3-game), and its initial config sets gui_browser_native=false too. A game started from that launcher gets no game mode.

The data

• The player’s own games: game-data-packager’s ScummVM packages ([data_setup] in each bundle), made by Walnut Games’ Add game files or walnut-data import. Our game-data-packager adds what Debian’s lacks for the player’s copies: the Spanish VGA floppy release of The Secret of Monkey Island (patch 0016), the Spanish EGA release of Loom (0017), and --no-launchers for ScummVM games (part of 0004: no .desktop link into game-data-packager-runtime, no icon; the import would refuse the link). Day of the Tentacle’s CD releases install monster.sou or its FLAC repack monster.sof, whichever the copy has: the import’s manifest lists both as optional files (tools/gamedb/gdp-manifest.py). Loom’s VGA talkie (loom-en-data) is left out for now: its music is a ripped CD track, which the manifest can’t describe yet (todo).
• The free games: Debian’s beneath-a-steel-sky, flight-of-the-amazon-queen, lure-of-the-temptress, drascula with drascula-music, installed with ScummVM by Walnut Games.

Status

Smoke runs on the PS3 (recipe games/scummvm/benchmark/recipe.sh, variants per game; the player’s copies in ~/Games/scummvm/<GAME>, never in the repository; their checksums are in each game’s technical.md):

On the PC (2026-10-30, ScummVM 2026.1.0 in a Debian container, SDL’s dummy video), every menu entry’s command started its game: the four free ones say “Running …”, and the five from the player’s copies (the packages our gdp made from them) wrote their target’s detected edition into the game’s config (extra, lang_Spanish).

All the PS3 runs at 1920x1080 fullscreen with the 4:3 picture between bars and the colours right (ScummVM’s default graphics, the 8-bit picture through our big-endian SDL), about 85-90 MB peak RSS, the AdLib music running with no audible dropouts. The Gallium HUD’s numbers mean nothing here (6-9 fps, “stalls”): ScummVM presents a frame only when the picture changes. Its ALSA sequencer errors (/dev/snd/seq) are the MIDI port probe, harmless with the AdLib emulator. Full Throttle (282 MB) and The Dig (245 MB) were removed from the console after their runs for the disk; they have no entry yet.