ScummVM 2026.4.0 Adds Dungeon Master, Rebel Assault and Harvester on the Project's 25th Anniversary

ScummVM 2026.4.0 is out, released on 11 October to mark 25 years since the project's first public commit. The release, nicknamed "Never-slop", adds support for FTL Games' Dungeon Master, both Star Wars: Rebel Assault games, the horror adventure Harvester and, by the count of the announcement's author, sev, 194 newly supported games across 12 new engines. Builds for Windows, macOS (including PowerPC Macs), Dreamcast, Haiku and OpenDingux are available now, with the other ports to follow.

A quarter-century, and a faster cadence

The announcement opens with the anniversary: "a quarter-century and a couple of days ago, the ScummVM Project saw its first public commit by Ludvig Strigeus aka ludde." Strigeus wrote the original program to play LucasArts adventures built on the SCUMM scripting system, and the project has since grown to cover engines from many other studios.

ScummVM is not an emulator in the usual sense. Rather than emulating the PC or console a game ran on, it reimplements the game's engine, the part of the software that interprets its scripts and data, in portable C++. That is why it runs on hardware as varied as Dreamcasts, Android phones and Haiku desktops, and why the team describes it as lighter than running the original executables in an operating system emulator such as DOSBox. Players supply the game files from their own copies.

This is the fourth ScummVM release of 2026. Until last year the project shipped roughly once a year: 2.8.0 at the end of 2023, 2.9.0 in December 2024 and a 2.9.1 point release in May 2025. In January, 2026.1.0 switched to year-based version numbers and promised "more frequent releases". It was followed by 2026.2.0 in March and 2026.3.0 in June.

The headline additions

The longest entry is a single line: support for "other Wintermute engine games, over 140 titles". Named additions include Alpha Polaris, Face Noir, Dark Fall: Lost Souls, The Lost Crown, nine Mortadelo y Filemón adventures, Dracula: Resurrection and Dracula 2, Amerzone, The Cameron Files, six more Nancy Drew mysteries, Dragonsphere, Return of the Phantom, Once Upon a Forest and Der Schatz im Silbersee.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire are the most recognisable names. LucasArts' 1993 rail shooter was the company's first CD-ROM-only game, built from digitised film footage and pre-rendered 3D. ScummVM lists both games under its SCUMM engine and rates them "Good", meaning playable to the end with minor issues; its notes mention "minor graphical and sound glitches". The first game is supported in its DOS, Macintosh, 3DO and Sega CD versions, and the sequel on DOS, Macintosh and Windows, with the PlayStation version unsupported.

Dungeon Master, FTL Games' 1987 dungeon crawler, went into public testing on 8 October and appears in the new release's list. FTL released it first on the Atari ST, then on the Amiga in 1988 and DOS in 1992. It became the ST's best-selling game of all time, and its real-time party combat and spell system, in which players combine runes to build spells, made it an influential early example of the party-based crawler that Eye of the Beholder later followed. ScummVM supports two versions: the English Amiga release 2.0 and the US DOS release 3.4. The original Atari ST version is not on the list.

Harvester, DigiFX Interactive's 1996 adventure written and directed by Gilbert P. Austin, is supported in its English, French and European versions. ScummVM's testing announcement warns that it "depicts scenes of graphic violence, sex and gore".

Two smaller additions come with caveats. The Fool's Errand, the tarot-themed puzzle game, is supported only in its original Macintosh edition, because the DOS, Amiga and Atari ports use a different engine. Lord Avalot d'Argent, a 1994 comedy adventure by Thorsoft of Letchworth, runs on ScummVM's Avalanche engine in its original DOS release.

Fixes for games already supported

Seventeen existing engines were improved. The most substantial is the Hopkins engine, which the announcement calls finally complete: the release adds the underwater base first-person shooter section, which the announcement compares to Wolfenstein 3D, with an optional map and autopilot display. Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 gain an optional automap. Lure of the Temptress gets a fix for a long-standing pathfinding bug, and Riddle of Master Lu a batch of crash and logic fixes, which the announcement notes is hard work because the game's logic is hard-coded rather than scripted.

There are also changes aimed at accuracy. Commodore 64 SCUMM games get an option for PAL timing of their SID music, which the release notes say "slows down the music, but that's how many non-US players would have heard it." The TsAGE engine gains General MIDI and MT-32 music. The GLK and Freescape engines can load ZX Spectrum games directly from TAP and TZX tape images. ScummVM now uses a faster fork of the Nuked-OPL3 AdLib emulator, and can unpack "obfuscated" InstallShield files, so some Nancy Drew games no longer need their Windows installer run first. The Android port adds Android 17 support, text-to-speech and external MIDI devices.

Readers who want to try the SCUMM engine's original home can start with the Sam & Max Hit the Road review; ScummVM supports that 1993 LucasArts adventure.

The name

The project has not explained "Never-slop". The release's changelog does include an update to its AI guidelines, merged on 28 September under the title "Update AI guidelines in light of recent developments". The guidelines allow AI-assisted contributions with conditions: assistance must be disclosed with an `Assisted-by` tag in the commit message, "Code MUST NOT be authored by an AI agent", and AI may not be used to make media assets such as logos and icons. One rule reads: "No slop. Do not submit code changes that solely rely on "vibe coding" without understanding the generated code."

What is not known yet

Builds for the remaining platforms had not been published when the release was announced, and the post gives no date for them. There is a small discrepancy in the list of new games: the announcement includes Eagle Eye Mysteries and Eagle Eye Mysteries in London, but the release notes, dated 10 October, do not. The project has not said when the next release will come.