"Unknown Game Variant" reported when trying to add Private Eye

[caffeineLover]

Private Eye is listed on the ScummVM site and wiki as a supported game.

I tried to add the game Private Eye (English) and received a "Unknown game variant" message.

I'm using ScummVM 2.8.1 (March 16 2024). The message reported is:

============================================================================

The game in 'ASSETS\' seems to be an unknown game variant.

Please report the following data to the ScummVM team at https://bugs.scummvm.org/ along with the name of the game you tried to add and its version, language, etc.:

Matched game IDs for the agi engine: troll

{"game.dat", 0, "575f7a4bf3b84ac87e540d1351d9fc1f", 190926},

[tag2015]

From recent Discord discussion, I suppose this is a non-legit version?
Referring to the ​wiki page you shouldn't have an ASSETS directory at all.

Furthermore, the "game.dat" detection is a false positive. It gets detected as a variant of "Troll's Tale" but, clearly, it has nothing to do with that game.

[caffeineLover]

I owned this game a long, long, long time ago. Probably going on 20 years now. I had Windows XP, and the game never ran correctly -- never had sound. Lost the game media over the years but just discovered that SCUMMVM actually plays it. This is from an abandonware site since I no longer have the media.

It's a bit of a conundrum. I understand that nobody wants to support a non-legitimate game, but from Google, it appears that the game no longer even installs correctly, so even if someone does have the media from the 1990s, installing the game on the hard drive in the first place might be problematic. It might require wine or virtualbox which is .... not within reach of the average recreational computer user.

But yeah. Even if there's no desire to support the game given all that, it shouldn't be registering as Troll's Tale, anyhow.

Feel free to close if this isn't anything supportable. Originally, I was going to create a Win98 VM; I'm just very grateful to you that I can play it under ScummVM.

[digitall]

I have the original CD version from 1996. I had no problems getting the required datafiles / installing without any issues.

There is no assets folder on the CD, only ./support/assets.z and ./pvt_demo/support/assets.z

Apart from the legal aspects, this is one of the other reasons we do not support random downloaded versions with dubious modifications i.e. they may have been hacked around by patches, had malware added or corrupted by repeated copying / damaged media.

Closing this bug as invalid, unless a user comes forward with an original CD which has this directory structure.