Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up
pixeldust.se
pixeldust.se
Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.
And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.
I'd personally say the EGA portraits look far more uncanny, resembling early CGI, while the VGA version looks like a hand-drawn book illustration. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181 Still, opinions can differ.
> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT
That may be true, yes.
The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.
Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.
I'm not sure. The dithering is obviously different, not only harsher but in different places in many scenes. Also, the splash screen doesn't have scrolling clouds in the CGA version. And there are other subtle changes.
Call me weird but there's a certain charm to the CGA version, though it's obviously the worst of them. My favorite is the EGA version.
In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
> It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
In many cases, especially in the early days, artists didn't know what to do with so many colors, and produced inferior versions. Loom is a good example. The conclusion is that it's less about hardware capabilities and more about artistry, and technical limitations often force artists to be ingenious.
Even the internal speakers actually made the intro theme great.
The CD was nicer to listen to overall but I do think the floppy audio just has something about it that I prefer.
Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly on.
I even bought the fake retroremake Eternal Castle, which is a loving homage to that era.
It's interesting how the VGA version manages to be way less nuanced, plus it destroys that beautiful "blue" look of the night scenes.
EGA Loom is a work of art. VGA Loom misread the style and completely obliterated it, in its eagerness to deploy that early VGA "pillow shadow" style so typical of games of that era. (I love the term "pillow shadow", so apt now that I've learned it!).
Every nightly blue gone, light sources broken, every shadow gone, ominous deep-black tree shadows converted into gray/brownish things, etc.
To be clear, I think this is less a limitation of VGA and more a case of the conversion done lazily and/or by an inferior artist.
For a relatively static display like that EHB would've not been a problem, and the amount of gradual changes would've made it easy to exploit in the palette. Using the copper to modify the palette a few places would've also allowed for more, and switching to 640x200 below the graphics to make the text smoother would've been outright trivial. Even HAM might've been reasonably feasible.
I didn't care much about the actual main story, Ron Gilbert was never serious about the story anyway (and he coldly murdered it in the long-awaited "official" sequel, Return)
But I loved how each island was like a unique mini world onto itself, and as a kid it really struck me how it was always night on some islands and always day on others (which I later liked to headcanon as being set on a tidally-locked planet :)
Chapter 2 of LeChuck's Revenge is one of my best memories in gaming. Why haven't any modern games tried to recapture that piratey seabreeze freedom of exploring many different islands?
Maybe they could pull a Thimbleweed Park and do a "spiritual successor" in all but name, like it did with Maniac Mansion, and call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
But yeah the best thing about it was always the atmosphere and world, less so the writing.
Like imagine a side arc to overthrow Governor Phatt and so on :)
Trying to keep integrity and genuine without using AI but it's looking like I may have to originate to pixel art style.
I get what you mean, but I thought Return was a genuinely good game, done with passion, and miles better than the other MI sequels after 2. Of course, the original MI is still my favorite, followed closely by MI 2.
It's a shame some fans turned so toxic, Ron Gilbert had to turn off comments in his blog (edit: but I see has has since turned them back on. Yay!).
Really, and I mean this honestly, I had immense fun on my C64 using BBSes, playing games. It wouldn't be the worst fate, if everyone moved back to BBSes + games like this on the C64.
A neat project.
Definitely in this era the C64 hardware held up better for longer than expected. I didn't feel the x86 side caught up and surpassed the C64 as an entire package in both graphics and sound until the 486 era. A platform that was truly cursed on the gaming side for a long time due to its primary market focus being business use. And here I am using a 9850X3D with 5070 GPU, distant descendents of our old 286 hardware that I would play Monkey Island on.
That’s also a combination that I don’t remember too many people having. A Sound Blaster and a VGA card in a 286. Yes in some ways with that particular combination, you’d be rising above the Commodore. But it’s a bit unusual.
https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/S-Z/Secret_of_Monk...
I always wondered how this worked on the Amiga and PC ports of the classic games. Did they just copy the approach and use text mode as well or did they use proper bitmap images as backgrounds? Same question for games that were native to the 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?
Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.
Similarly, e.g. slow down the door animation, and a fade, and you ought to have enough time for a decent fast loader to load the next screen (~2-3 seconds assuming you're loading 2/3 of the screen)
You really benefit from the low amount of action on screen here.
If you want to actually compress the data to reduce the number of floppies, you'd slow it down quite a bit. If you were doing it for a real C64 or cartridges constrained to what was viable at the time, that might well be preferable to more floppies. If you're doing it for a modern cartridge or an emulator, it won't matter.
I wonder how many floppies it will be.
Notably, this is one game that needed RAM expansion on A500, would not work with just the builtin 512KB.
C64 can cheat via cartridge mapper.
C64: https://lospec.com/palette-list/commodore64
Default EGA palette (which Afaik monkey island used): https://lospec.com/palette-list/color-graphics-adapter
You see that the C64 palette has a much more muted, pastel look and does not map one to one to the CGA/default EGA palette. C64 has a lot less vivid colors, but it also has much better luminosity ramps which can make dithering look a lot better.
In addition, the C64 has restrictions on the number of colors you can use in the same 8x8 block which I don't think EGA had.
It takes an artist to turn a CGA/EGA image into a C64 image.
But your point is still valid: while IBM PCs and other machines of the time had a propensity for "pure" colors (cyan, magenta etc. - so 100% for one or two of the basic colors and 0 for the others), the C64 designers opted for more muted colors.
Which one? The listed palette looks nothing like the screenshot on the same page.
Notably, there's no way that light blue for example (which is the default font and border), nor the dark blue (which is the default background).
The screenshot is how I remember the C64, and consistent with other screenshots and photos. The listed hex codes are far off.
The one posted by the person you responded to is a bit muted, but the relative colors seems closer to what I'd expect.
If you're interested in how this palette (editor) was derived, read this: https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/.
The discussion on the above site is an update of the original post by the same author: https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/
Automatic conversion of images between different hardware platforms usually stood out as looking quite poor and a sign of a 'sloppy port'.
But the cartridges themselves contains gigabytes as you say.
Of course everything can be put on cartridge (fast) or a diskette (slow loading). If they decide on cartridge, correct me if I'm wrong, it won't work on emulators, right? Also characters and animations must fit in memory too. There are so many technical barriers to be sorted out aside from the backgrounds. That's all what I am wondering about.
The artist and its partner are two high profile guys from the demo scene. They know what they are doing and the game logic ain’t that complicated since point and click is deterministic and finite. This ain’t no open world game.
The challenges evolve around the graphics. Interlaced multi screen multi color pixel art is the bottleneck here. IRQ loaders are bound to available cycle time so there won’t be any usage of FLI.
Since no ascii graphics compression is possible the designers need to consider the amount of branches you can take to several local views when walking around the huge map. Too many graphic details will amount to huge loading times - a problem the later Monkey Island games back then already faced.
Since the C64 graphics modes are not dynamic you can predetermine them by a simple formula: more beauty amounts to more memory usage alias overall loading times.
Using not the full screen is a slight advantage here.
I believe the guys will come up with a great game. It won’t be fast paced this is for sure but it won’t be a beauty killed by its loading times like it is 1987 either.
I don't think it's a problem. The game is static enough I think it'd even be viable to hide most loading time even from a real floppy w/behind animation (e.g. slow down door opening and a fade long enough for a decent fast loader to load 6KB)
Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion
D42 is a system for making text adventures, not graphics adventures, so I wouldn't be surprised if the conversion ended up sub par.