Play hundreds of "new-old" games on OSX PPC with ScummVM!

[Tsomi]

Hi there!

What if I told you that a free, open-source project is still maintained, in 2025, to let you play more and more games on your beloved OSX PPC machines?

Download (it's free!)​

This project is ScummVM, with a new OSX PPC release made available last Christmas: it's compatible with OSX PPC 10.4 and 10.5 (and probably Sorbet Leopard and OSX 10.4-10.6 Intel through Rosetta 1 as well), and yes, even your non-AltiVec CPUs such as the G3 should be supported as well.

We still spend as much time as we can to preserve support for PowerPC and big-endian devices (and so, PS3, Wii, AmigaOS, MorphOS, Atari ports are still available too!), and I'm personally in charge of maintaining this OSX PPC port.

Supported games​

ScummVM is mostly focused on adventure games (point'n'click or 3D ones, often humorous ones), educational games and RPGs, but sometimes other games are supported as well.

(⇒ See some game screenshots below.)

Among many other titles, ScummVM supports:

• The LucasArts point'n'click/adventure games: Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango…
• The Humongous Entertainment games, aimed at children: Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, Spy Fox, the Backyard Sports series…
• The Sierra adventure games: King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Castle of Dr. Brain, Gabriel Knight…
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld games (unfortunately not sold anymore… but featuring Eric Idle!)
• Blazing Dragons (featuring Terry Jones!)
• The Simon the Sorcerer 2D games
• The Adibou & Adi educational games
• Blade Runner
• Myst, Riven
• Broken Sword
• Eye of the Beholder, Phantasmagoria, Ultima, The Legend of Kyrandia series
• Toonstruck (featuring Christopher Lloyd!)
• The Pink Panther adventure games
• The Longest Journey, Syberia 1 & 2
• Inherit the Earth, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
• 3 Skulls of the Toltecs, The Neverhood, Touché, Tony Tough, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes…
• The Blackwell Epiphany, Kathy Rain… and many other games made with AdventureGameStudio…
• …and many more!

Remember: ScummVM is not an emulator!​

Although it may look like one, ScummVM is not an emulator. Emulators emulate a full machine (e.g. DOSBox emulates a DOS PC, PCSX emulates a PS1…), but that's not what ScummVM does. ScummVM is actually a series of native game engines, either written through years of reverse-engineering, or from porting the original engine code of the games (when their authors let us do so).

What it means is that:

• For a game to be supported in ScummVM, we need to port its engine first (which usually requires months, if not years, of effort.)
• Once an engine has been ported to ScummVM, most of the systems supported by ScummVM should be able to run it in the same way
  • Let's take Monkey Island 2 as an example. This game was originally released for DOS, Amiga, Macintosh, and FM-TOWNS. If you own the DOS release, thanks to ScummVM you can play it on your OSX PPC system, iPhone, Wii (or whatever). If you own the Macintosh release, you can also play it on a regular Windows desktop.
• Since we don't have to emulate a machine, the games run in native speed (i.e. real PowerPC code with no intermediary translation), which means that they usually run faster and with lower requirements than an emulator. This way, ScummVM can be used to run older games on more limited machines (we still run on some Atari systems!), and that includes your older G4, B&W G3 or whatever (as long as it runs at least OSX 10.4).
  • (Of course, not all games can be run on the most limited devices. Don't expect a 2010 3D game to run on a B&W G3).

Where to get the games?​

ScummVM doesn't come with any game, by default. You have to either download the freeware ones, buy them on online stores where they're available, purchase old copies on eBay, or grab your own old CDs.

We do host some free demos, though. Some game publishers also explicitly allowed their games to be freely redistributed, and so we also host some free titles. (Note that "abandonware" is not a legal concept at all. ScummVM has no tolerance for this, and so no help or support will be given to people using or looking for such sources.)

A good number of games can be bought on GOG, Steam, or Zoom Platform (you can click this affiliate Zoom Platform link, if you like; this gives ScummVM a small amount of money from your purchase, which helps cover a small bit of the costs necessary to run it. More than 20 years of dedicated work have been put into it, and the result is given to everybody, for free.).

The "Where to get the games" page should help you figure out when to get most supported games. You'll probably need a regular PC to buy and download the games from these stores, but once you've fetched and extracted all the files there, you should be able to copy them over to your OSX PPC machine.

Installing and running the games​

Making a game playable with ScummVM is often (but not always, see below) just a matter of copying all its file to a local directory (avoid playing from original CDs if you can, except if you want the full mechanical experience with slower seek times).

i.e.:

1. Find your original CD/DVD/floppy image, or online media
2. Search the name of the game in the ScummVM wiki for any installation instructions (some games require a very particular process). The wiki will also list the data files required to play your game.
3. Following these instructions, extract the contents of your media, and/or launch any setup file that you may find in it
   1. (The innoextract tool can be used to extract the contents of an "offline" installation setup.exe file provided by GOG, even on non-Windows systems).
   2. Sometimes, you do need to run the original installer in a Windows VM, DOSBox instance, or Atari emulator, to extract the original resources to be fed to ScummVM. Other times, you're lucky and ScummVM can just extract the contents of the installation files on-the-fly. The Wiki should tell you what needs to be done, for each game. (We hope to make it this step easier for users in future releases.)
4. Copy the results to your OSX PPC system, e.g. in a "Games" directory on your desktop
5. Start ScummVM, drag'n'drop your game directory (or click the "Add" button in the ScummVM UI, and then navigate to the directory containing the data files of your game), hit "Play", and voilà!

For more information on the ScummVM interface (such as customizing it, handling saves and such), have a look at the Official ScummVM documentation.

Note: if ScummVM doesn't start at all, you may need to make sure that your Monitor is configured to "Millions of colors" in your system settings. If the ScummVM window appears but is glitchy right from the start (I've been told it may have problems on older GPUs such as the ATI Rage 128), go to Global Options > Graphics mode, and try switching to the SDL Surface option.

Special note: Extracting original Macintosh games​

If you're trying to play a Macintosh release (as long as it's supported; see the Compatibility list), you should be able to either copy the files from the HFS layout of your original CD (note that macOS Catalina and later removed plain HFS support — yes, most old game CDs used plain HFS and not HFS+ — but OSX 10.4-10.5 will read them without any trouble), preserving the original resource forks.

You can also use the ScummVM Dumper Companion, if all you have is an old .img or .iso file, and would like to extract its original Macintosh content. This extraction tool works on any system (it runs locally in your browser, nothing is sent to the Internet) and it can also be used to make your Macintosh game files play on any other system that ScummVM support (i.e. you can use this tool to have your Macintosh files compatible with FAT32 or whatever, so that your Macintosh game can be played on ScummVM for PC, PS3, or whatever.)

Screenshots​

See attached images for:

• Blade Runner
• Eye of the Beholder
• The Legend of Kyrandia 2: Hand of Fate
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
• Blackwell Epiphany
• The Longest Journey
• Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb
• The Secret of Monkey Island (DOS EGA release)
• Space Quest
• Discworld II
• Day of the Tentacle
• Syberia
• Leisure Suit Larry 5 (not for children!)
• Simon the Sorcerer 2
• Grim Fandango
• Gabriel Knight
• Maniac Mansion (NES release)
• Duckman
• The Neverhood
• Sam & Max Hit the Road

Reporting issues​

We have a vibrant Discord Server (with a legacy IRC channel bridge, if you really have to communicate from your original PPC system), and most of the development happens on GitHub.

Issues should ideally be reported on our Bug Tracker. If you encounter a bug on OSX PPC, please mention that you're using this port, and also try to see if your problem also happens on a more common environment (i.e. regular Intel/Apple silicon macOS, Windows or such). If you experience a crash, the technical trace given by Crash Reporter can also be a bit useful.

The project is made by volunteers, on our free time. Some of the team members devoted years on their life on this. So please be nice and always respectful, and understand that some problems or feature requests may take time (sometimes years) to be taken care of.

Contributions are of course very welcome. Reporting a problem on OSX PPC means that you'll also help the PS3, Wii, GameCube, AmigaOS4 or MorphOS ports, which have CPUs similar to the older G3 or G5.

More technical notes for OSX PPC​

If you want to make your own OSX PPC build (and are quite familiar with the OSX Terminal and building things there!), you can have a look at this repository (it's not as clean as we'd like it to be, but oh well). ScummVM doesn't require too many external libraries, but it does require a C++11 toolchain, so its bootstrap is not trivial. I mostly reuse the work which was done for TenFourFox. (The C++11 toolchain also means that support for anything older than Tiger is not on the table, sorry. We do have an older release for OSX 10.3, though.)

At the moment, the OSX PPC port is only built for stable ScummVM releases. This means that some the game engines being marked as unstable (because they're still a work-in-progress) are not enabled there. Intermediary test builds for OSX PPC are sometimes published here (with all the unstable engines), though. Feedback on them is very welcome.

At the moment, only a single PowerPC 32-bit binary is made. See we mostly target older games, I don't see the point of making a "fat" bundle with G3/G4/G5 optimizations, a 64-bit binary, or anything like that. The time/costs probably outweigh the benefits, at least for now. There's a bit of optional-AltiVec code which can be enabled on the fly if your machine supports it, for the SDL graphics or JPEG rendering. There aren't much more PowerPC-specific optimizations going on, but if someone proficient in vectorization wants to write some AltiVec blitters, that could be useful for some of the latter titles (e.g. for the AGS engine).

Some games may also have performance problems on OSX PPC. Some of them are inevitable (e.g. trying to run a 2011 3D game on a 2004 computer). Some game engines may just "suffer" from having been ported on a modern desktop, on a modern GPU where graphics optimizations don't matter that much, when porting older 2D/3D titles. An example of that is Blazing Dragons, which is actually slower in ScummVM than on a PS1 emulator running on the same device! Improving this is a matter of someone showing up with enough time and motivation to optimize the rendering part of the engine to fix this…

So yeah, compatibility problems with OSX PPC will show up. We try to do our best to preserve compatibility for older, non-mainstream systems, but testing all the supported games requires a lot of free time, and fixing bugs often requires even more time. Big-endian environments are also much more uncommon than they were in the mid-2000s, and so most of the newer engines get developed without frequent tests there.

Here's a typical example of the rendering issues which can show up on PPC:

So yeah, be prepared for some David Lynch vibes when testing some games. The more testers we have, the more bug reports we get, the more likely it is for these bugs to get fixed at some point.

So, if you want ScummVM to continue being supported on your beloved OSX PPC machine, use it! Give us feedback! Report problems, contribute, suggest things. And, more importantly, have fun!