Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine (SCUMMVM) 0.10.0 has just been released and lets us play some older PC games created for this system, on just about any computer system, including Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile Devices.

Many of Sierra’s adventure games and LucasFilm games were designed with this system, meaning they can be played using SCUMMVM. All we need to do is copy the relevant data files across to our device and SCUMMVM will decode and run it, just like you would see on a desktop computer.

After the “Abandonware: What’s all that about?” article I put up on the site a few days ago, I got thinking that I could legally download some of these games, for free, and run them on my Windows Mobile Device.

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Remember the games and applications we used to use constantly? Many of these have been abandoned by their manufacturer and released to the public domain free of charge. This is because they are no longer making the company any money and the company no longer wants to support the product. The result is that some of these games and applications can be freely distributed.

Because of this, the term “Abandonware” started. There are a whole heap of games that were made before 2000 that can now be downloaded and played for free.

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One of the big questions for people interested in moving over to Vista is “Will my games work under Vista?”. I have tried out 10 of my games and had quite a successful adventure into Vista Gaming. I was able to get all the games below up and running, but it wasn’t without its difficulties.

To be fair to Vista, most of the problems I came across were related to video card drivers which have nothing to do with Vista itself. I started off this experiment using the drivers that came with my video card. I soon found that an update was required and this allowed most games to work without any other tweaking.

This article will look at a broad range of games which have been popular over the last 8 years. I will also explain my successes and difficulties installing each of these. All games are legitimate copies and cross many genres.

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One of my favourite games as I was growing up would have to be Wolfenstein 3D. It has been available in all its glory on pocket PC for some time now but I never got around to running it. I should have.

This version will allow you to have all the levels available with you on hand with an easy enough to use interface. It is quite playable. Not compared to playing on your PC, but I did get through the first map without any problems and the secret doors and sounds all worked just as they do in the original.

Give it a try and see how it runs on your device. It was flawless in the time I played it. Available from PocketInsanity.