SCUMM Explorer is a MacOS program that I made to display and extract data from Lucasarts games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Full Throttle… just to name a few). It can display images, play sound, music, disassemble scripts and dump unsupported blocks as raw data.
The first version ran on 68000-based Macintoshes and on PowerPC as native. Version 0.4 is the last one that runs also on MacOS Classic.
But I also made a quick porting to Windows. Of course it is still aimed at Mac-based SCUMM games, which had some slight differences from their PC counterparts, particularly about the music format.
The language used to make SCUMM Explorer is RealBasic (now Xojo), which at the time I made this, was very similar to Microsoft Visual Basic, but had the advantage of being able to compile both Mac and PC applications.
Of course, a similar project requires a lot of work on the reverse-engineering side, to discover the file formats. That was part of the reason why I chose Basic, to keep things simple. At the time I was also part of the ScummVM team. My role was to port ScummVM to MacOS, and while doing this, I discovered a few bugs and had the opportunity to increase my knowledge of the SCUMM engine and its formats. I also made a lot of experience in C programming and in the use of CVS and Sourceforge.
My main concern was to decode the file formats for music on Mac, as it sounded a lot better than it did on PC. I succeeded on that and, since this was one of my goals, I recently isolated this functionality into a more specific tool (SCUMM Midi Player) for just playing music from Monkey Island and other SCUMM games.
Downloads
Enrico Rolfi's Gaming Tools 
I didn’t remember you ported the application to MacOsX too. 🙂
Apple says that MacOS classic is dead
BTW I’m going to release SCUMM Midi Player soon
pretty cool. it makes me want to create a game like this, but first i think i’d have to write my own scumm-like gaming language…..
Hi! I’m trying to analyze the music of Monkey Island 2 and I came upon your program (for details, see thread here: http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=208682 ).
My question is: can the SCUMM Midi Player be downloaded anywhere? I’d love to try it out!
Sure, I’ll upload the thing here next week. Hope you’ll like it. And good luck for your music project! Seems like a pretty nice idea to me to do music sheets!
The SCUMM Midi Player that I made is aimed at the Mac version of Monkey 2, so you must have the Mac version data file to listen to the music with the right instruments and stuff.
Maybe my opinion is a little obvious, but I think that SCUMM Midi Player sounds very very similar to the original. The reason is that I made a lot of studies on it. For example, notes on Midi channels are shifted to closely match the tone of the instrument samples found in the original Mac game. I also coded a compressor-like effect that tweaks notes velocity. I tuned the whole results to sound best using the standard Midi instruments shipped with Quicktime on Mac and the Microsoft ones on Windows. Never tried it with Soundfonts, but that would be an interesting experiment to do.
Can SCUMM MIDI player be downloaded anywhere yet?
Have a look at the following update:
Thank you! I’ll check it out right away. 🙂 (did my comment prompt the release, all these years later?)
Sort of. When you first asked in 2011 I packed up everything but then I forgot to post it here. Surprisingly, nobody complained. 😊
I wanted to ask if you happen to know I advise where I can find the book or a complete tutorial to learn how to program a game with the Scumm platform. I did some research but so far I have not found anything. I await news .
Yours sincerely.
Sorry I don’t think there’s anything like that available. Scumm is still copyrighted and all the documentation on it comes from reverse engineering. You could try asking at the ScummVM forums.
Anyway, if you want to make your own Scumm-like game you can use AGS or other engines freely available.
Pingback: Why’d We Start MOLMF? – Men Of Low Moral Fiber
Hello, I had a look at your page and while reading your story I remembered about my own childhood. I like when you say:
“instead of shooting each other with rocket launchers or punching each other with fiery hadoukens in our other multi-player console games, it was the LucasArts games that really brought us together, and taught that sometimes fighting isn’t the best method of brotherly bonding.”
I also like the whole idea of your podcast. Please keep up the good work!!
And…You were so lucky to live so close to Lucasfilm!