A homebrew developer is working on porting SCUMM, the engine behind many classic point-and-click adventure games on the PC, to the Saturn.
Happy-Ferret gave an update Thursday on the Saturn version of SCUMM on Bluesky. “Runs buttery smooth on Sega Saturn,” he said, showing off three screenshots of Day of the Tentacle running on Saturn emulator Yabause.
Happy-Ferret is a big fan of SCUMM. He’s already worked on ports of it to Nintendo 64, Sega CD, PlayStation and 3DO. His indie developer brand, Happy Ferret Entertainment, is using a derivative called SCUNK to make new point-and-click adventure games on retro and current-generation platforms.
A Saturn port has been in the works since earlier this year. The in-progress SCUMM engine hasn’t been tested on real hardware yet, but Happy-Ferret said it works in the Mednafen, Yabause and Ymir emulators.
Right now, Happy-Ferret is working on implementing an audio backend, fixing the colors and adding support for loading and saving games. He doesn’t plan on adding keyboard support — he’ll use the current time from the Saturn’s internal clock for save game names — but he has implemented mouse support. He posted a video showing it off on the SegaXtreme Discord server today:
Engine changes
Happy-Ferret initially used JoEngine to implement SCUMM on Saturn, then abandoned that for the newer Saturn Ring Library, then switched back to JoEngine.
“I’ve had more cold starts on it than any other platform,” Happy-Ferret said on Discord.
“Earlier in the year I tried porting my unfinished SCUMM engine via Joengine but ran into rendering issues I never fixed,” he said. “Then I pivoted to the PS1 and managed to port ScummVM 0.6.0 to it. I then decided to try and port that same codebase to the Saturn using SRL but currently I’m running into issues during boot.”
In the end, he went back to JoEngine after running into heap issues with SRL. “I’d rather use Yaul in the future anyways,” he said.
Happy-Ferret apparently isn’t averse to using Claude AI for some tasks but said he didn’t use it for the current implementation on JoEngine.
“For the SRL port that died in its crib, I [used] Claude AI,” he said on Discord. “But for this one, it’s sweat and tears.”
He’s specifically porting SCUMM version 6. LucasArts made SCUMM in the 1980s for its first point-and-click adventure game, Maniac Mansion — SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. After that, the company upgraded it every couple years with more advanced features for its future games. Version 6 is circa 1993 and was used that year to make Sam & Max Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle.
Porting version 6 means any of the seven games made with previous versions as well as the two games made with version 6 could be ported to Saturn with relative ease.
SCUMM version 7 was used in 1994 for The Dig and Full Throttle. The final version, 8, was used for 1997’s Curse of Monkey Island. Those likely would be out of reach of Happy-Ferrett’s SCUMM port.
Anyone who wants to support Happy-Ferret can do so at his Patreon.
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