Running GOG.com ScummVM Games on a Raspberry Pi

I have a lot of games from GOG.com which of course runs flawlessly on Mac and PC. However I want to play some of these games on my Raspberry Pi. Today I will be showing you how to play Goblins Quest 3 on the Raspberry Pi. The Gobliins pack runs under ScummVM instead of DosBox, therefore the setup process will be different from our last DosBox article. I thought at first it’s going to be challenging getting the game up and running using Raspberry Pi but it turns out to be very easy!

Prepare the ScummVM

Fortunately for us, ScummVM is ready to use from the Raspbian respository. All we have to do is do the usual install command:

This will get you prepared with the scumm emulator

Transfer the Game

You’ll need to install the GOG game first on a Windows or Mac machine. I will use the Windows installed version for this example. The GOG games are always installed under either C:\GOG Games\ or C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\. In my case, Goblins 3 was installed under C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Gobliiins Pack\Goblins 3\ So copy all the files under that directory to your Raspberry Pi. You can either use a USB key or transfer the files using an sFTP program like the screenshot on the right. If you are not sure what is your IP, just type ifconfig on your Raspberry Pi and you’ll see the IP. The username and password should be the same as your Raspberry Pi login credentials. To conform with the last Dos games article, we’ll put the Goblins 3 files under /home/pi/dos/goblins3

Prepare the Game Config

The great thing about buying GOG games apart from being DRM-Free is that they normally work out of the box. This means all the configurations included with the pack is already optimized for that game. In our example, you’ll find the file Goblins3.ini under the goblins3 directory. This is the included config file. Most of the settings will be usable, but we will need to update the game paths ourselves. So open the Goblins3.ini file in your Raspberry Pi and we’ll start the adjustments. First, remove the themepath configuration, we don’t really need this for our Raspberry Pi installation. The themepath can be found under the “scummvm” section.

Secondly, update the savepath and the path configuration to match your Raspberry Pi game installation directory. The original configuration would be like:

Change this to be:

The above should be enough to prepare the game to be up and running.

Create a Launcher Script

To play the game all you have to do is go into the goblins 3 directory and launch scummvm with the correct configuration. The full commands would be like this:

By the way, if you ever forget or want to know what is the game target name to launch, you can always list it using:

In any case, we don’t want to type the full commands all the time just to start the game, so we’ll write a short shell script to start the game. First, create using any text editor on the Pi, the file called play.sh Then we enter the scummvm command in the play script:

Lastly make the file executable.

That’s it, to play the game all you have to do is go to the directory /home/pi/dos/goblins3/ and type ./play.sh 

Increasing Performance

If you need to increase the performance of the game, you’ll have to shutdown every other services that may be running on your Raspberry Pi such as Apache, MySQL, etc. You’ll also benefit on overclocking the Raspberry Pi to some degree. I use “high” on my setup because I don’t want to take too much risks.

Anyway, enjoy your Goblins Quest 3 (or any other scummvm) games on the Raspberry Pi! This game runs great too, almost like the original PC version.

Categorised in: Fun computing, Raspberry Pi