The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake.
Watching this, neither version seem as good as I remember the Amiga version looking, which was still dithered but looked better than the EGA version. Obviously hard to say without a direct video comparison.
A very wise move! With the current state of AI, the loss and cost of RAM, with GPUs and CPUs being eaten up, we'll all need to move back to C64s soon.
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.
Looks good, I had a C128 but played The Secret of Monkey Island around its release but didn't know there was an EGA version. It looks like the two were released apart by just a few months.
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.
I do not and have never owned a C64, but Monkey Island is (in my opinion) one of the pinnacles of gaming so this effort to extend it to yet another platform is wonderful to see!
I am assuming this will demand REU or an ultimate 64 to run it? Hard to believe they would be able to package this and make the game fluent without more ram.
God, I wish a new modern game would capture the essence of Monkey Island, which for me was the ISLANDS themselves.
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 :)
The artwork is an unique style and a part that takes most time, trying to find artists that who are available for commission is where I'm struggling at for my game.
Trying to keep integrity and genuine without using AI but it's looking like I may have to originate to pixel art style.
> 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)
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!).
The good old Commodore did not have nearly enough memory to store all these beautiful images as screen sized bitmaps. Most of the games used text mode with a custom character set.
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?
I'm not so familiar with the C64, but Monkey Island did indeed use graphics mode on all the 16/32 bit systems it supported - PC graphics cards had their video memory on the card (same as they do today), so saving memory by using text mode didn't make sense. The only problem with that was that the CPU had to be used for any processing of the video memory, so especially scrolling the whole screen was sometimes a bit slow with weaker CPUs. The Amiga and Atari ST didn't have a dedicated text mode.
Text mode with user-definable multi-colour characters was mostly a 8-bit exclusive feature. Another reason C64 used that trick was the hardware scroll feature, which allowed shifting the whole screen between 0 to 7 pixels. It was much faster to copy 25x80 characters (as compared to copying a hires/multicolour bitmap with a 8 pixel offset) after the 7th pixel, and reset the scroll bit to 0.
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I wonder how many floppies it will be.
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.
Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion
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.
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 :)
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!).
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?