On Aug 21, 2021, at 4:55 PM, Dylan Servilla via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hi, I'm Dylan. I've been a docent at the VCF museum since last May, and I'm there most weekends. I'm also a computer science student at Rutgers New Brunswick and a developer for ScummVM, the game engine reimplementation project.
I've been working on ScummVM's Macromedia Director engine for the past two years. It was just officially announced, and I thought the list might be interested: https://www.scummvm.org/news/20210817/
Macromedia Director was originally released in 1985 as MacroMind VideoWorks, an animation program for the Macintosh. Soon after, a scripting language was introduced, the program was renamed Director, and it became heavily used in CD-ROM games in the 1990s. ScummVM now supports early Director titles, allowing them to be played natively on modern computers. Eventually this will be able to play a huge number of old CD-ROM games.
This is really great! One of the first truly remarkable games I played on the Mac was Cosmic Osmo, which was made in MacroMind (I don't remember if they called it VideoWorks at that point or if it was MacroMind Director). Amusingly, it was roughly contemporary with the Dark Castle/Beyond Dark Castle series, whose programmer eventually wound up developing (much of) Flash. Funny how these things coincide and collide. - Dave