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.
Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).
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 think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.
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
This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.
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.
Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.
Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).
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.
Amiga versions seem the best of all the Lucasarts adventures, music is just much richer and although Monkey Island and Loom are done in the reduced color palette so look more stylistic I think they use a few more colors or better shades of colors than the harsh looking EGA set.
I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. The Amiga supported 32 colors (without tricks like EHB and HAM) in 320x200/240 mode, so only twice as much as EGA, but they could be picked freely from a palette of 4096 colors, so IMHO it looked much better than the EGA version with its fixed 16 colors. But if you look at screenshots (https://scummbar.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...
I was going to say this. I never liked the 256-color VGA game (and now comparing, it does look bland) but Amiga struck the best, IMHO, balance between good hand-crafted pixel art but with realistic enough colors to give sufficient depth and athmosphere in the scene.
For a game like that, while I agree with the Amiga version looks good, frankly the Amiga port still feels like a good example of why there were lots of complaints about "lazy" ports for the Amiga that didn't take proper advantage of what it could do.
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 must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia.
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.
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 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.
Good question! Since the game is mostly scene-based, it should be possible to play it scene by scene with lots of reading from disk. However the original game also had some larger scenes that used quite a lot of horizontal scrolling (some backgrounds for those scenes can be seen under "A collection of backgrounds from the game" in the article), not so sure about those...
Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.
The large scenes looks like about 4 screens wide? But they're not full height - looks like about 2/3, so let's say ~24KB total including color data. I don't think it should be a problem. The walk + scroll is slow enough that if you had to (and I don't think you do) you ought to be able to time things so you can load the next screen while the player is walking.
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.
You can do amazing things with only a single SID channel. One of the most impressive examples is the in-game music of Hawkeye [1] which allows to use the remaining two channels for sound effects.
Hand drawn pixel graphics heavily relied on the hardware's color palette (and monitor properties) for dithering and 'lighting' tricks, and especially the C64 color palette is quite 'exotic' and didn't have overlap with other home computers of the time. You need to consider that essentially each pixel was carefully placed by hand to 'enhance' the limitations of the builtin palette through color bleeding with the neighoring pixels on CRT monitors.
Automatic conversion of images between different hardware platforms usually stood out as looking quite poor and a sign of a 'sloppy port'.
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.
I think the C64 palette you linked has been "tweaked" by the artist who uploaded it, this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color
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.
On my screen that doesn't match videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's. (It also doesn't match my memory of them, but that's a whole lot less reliable)
One floppy holds 176KB per side. One full screen of bitmap graphics is 8KB+1KB color, but the game fills only about 2/3 of the screen, so lets say 6KB w/o any compression.
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)
I don’t get your concern. Could you please be a bit more specific?
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.
Modern flash carts like EasyFlash and clones allow for absolutely cavernous cartridge images. As good examples, see the C64 ports of Prince of Persia and Eye of the Beholder, which run entirely from massive cartridge ROMs.
The EGA version was 4 1.44MB disks for MS-DOS, IIRC. Let's say 5MB. That's about 30 disk sides or 15 disks in DD disks. Not that bad actually, and perhaps the C64 images are smaller or more compressible than the EGA ones... So this should be some kind of an upper limit.
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 :)
When I was a little kid Monkey Island honestly felt magical, even though the gameplay is essentially a linear puzzle it really did feel like you were walking around a little living world and just how cinematic and seamless the opening titles are to the first scene too just didn't feel like any other videogame, more like a little movie world.
But yeah the best thing about it was always the atmosphere and world, less so the writing.
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.
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.
More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's interesting how the VGA version manages to be way less nuanced, plus it destroys that beautiful "blue" look of the night scenes.
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.
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.
https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/S-Z/Secret_of_Monk...
[1] https://youtu.be/es-rWnVSJ1c
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.
https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en
Automatic conversion of images between different hardware platforms usually stood out as looking quite poor and a sign of a 'sloppy port'.
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/
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)
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.
But the cartridges themselves contains gigabytes as you say.
I wonder how many floppies it will be.
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.
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.
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.