Introduction

Perentie is a Lua-based graphical adventure game engine. The design is heavily inspired by LucasArts' SCUMM and GrimE adventure game engines.

Perentie is designed for the hardware constraints of Pentium-era MS-DOS. You can run it in any of the following environments:

• MS-DOS, including as a child process from inside Windows 3.1/95/98
• Natively on most platforms (via SDL3)
• Embedded in a webpage (via SDL3 + Emscripten)

Featuring:

• Lua-based scripting API
• Co-operative threading
• 320x200 resolution 256 colour VGA graphics
• Programmable dithering engine (convert your graphics to EGA and CGA!)
• Bitmap text rendering with support for UTF-8
• PC speaker tone/sample playback
• OPL2/OPL3 music playback
• Debug shell over null modem/Telnet connection

Perentie was originally created for DOS Games Jam July 2024.