ScummVM donations suspended
PayPal thinks they're naughty.
The enterprising folks behind adventure-game emulator ScummVM have been forced to stop accepting donations after PayPal told them that their activities contravened the company's policy regarding software capable of playing a game on a "system it was not sold for".
Idiots. You can read all about it on ScummVM's forum, where you can also find advice about how to email PayPal and make fun of them for being loonies. As the ScummVM people point out, PayPal's decision makes "absolutely no sense for a project like ScummVM, which is often actively assisted by the original game developers and studios".
Charles Cecil, for example, who told us last month that he has "an enormous amount of admiration for ScummVM". "Scumm VM came along, we gave them the source code [for Beneath A Steel Sky], they wrote an emulator, and they made it work," he told us. "As far as I'm concerned, they're offering their software for free; I thought there's no reason why we shouldn't offer Beneath A Steel Sky for free. I wish I could say that as a marketing genius I planned it, but that would be a dreadful lie."
Since then of course the emulator's been on various platforms, including mobile phones, Sony PSP and even Dreamcast.