I recently looked into Simon the Sorcerer II’s Amiga and Mac releases. From what I was able to gather, the Amiga release was originally planned and then scrapped. It was later licensed by E.P.I.C. Interactive and built on top of the Windows CD release. ScummVM already supported these versions of the game, but it detected them as English only, with no way to switch between the existing French, Italian, and German text languages.

The interesting part was that these releases use English as the base data set, with the other languages stored in separate text files layered on top rather than as completely separate game builds. That is why the same release can still fundamentally be “English” while also containing German, Italian, and, in the updated Amiga/Mac release, French text.

The localized text is kept in files such as simon2.german, simon2.italian, simon2.french, and simon2.english, with each file containing translated strings using a simple byte-plus-one encoding. The engine now allows selecting a language from the ScummVM game options, or switching at runtime with the space bar. It then builds a runtime overlay from the selected language file by replacing the relevant strings.

The original game also shows small flag icons when the language is changed with the space bar, but these are not stored as separate graphics on disk. Instead, the engine draws them directly using multiple coloured rectangles. This was a fun bit of reverse engineering to dig into.

I also added new detection entries for the Amiga base release and the version 5 update available here, now the game is identified correctly, however an outstanding issue, is that there is currently no way to identify the Mac version separately, though for all intents and purposes, they are identical.