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Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up
- simonw 6mo agoThose backgrounds look so good. I wonder if they'll be able to do anything with the iconic music.
- classichasclass 6mo agoWith a SID? No problem. I think the title track could be arranged very easily for three voices.
- constructrurl 6mo ago[dead]
- hannes0x21 6mo agoEven the PC speaker version is pretty good, so I would absolutely second this.
- nwellnhof 6mo agoYou 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. [1] https://youtu.be/es-rWnVSJ1c https://youtu.be/es-rWnVSJ1c
- selcuka 6mo agoThere are already remakes of MI tunes for C64: https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/S-Z/Secret_of_Monkey_Island.sid https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/S-Z/Secret_of_Monk...
- nnevatie 6mo agoSeriously good-looking gfx - kudos!
- p0w3n3d 6mo agoI wonder how do they want to overcome the memory limit? Or will it be using cartridge extensively?
- eru 6mo agoYou can load from disk (or tape) on-demand?
- classichasclass 6mo agoModern 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.
- joachimma 6mo agoEye of the Beholder is about 1MB, for comparison Terminator 2 on cartridge from back in the day was 512kB. But the cartridges themselves contains gigabytes as you say.
- p0w3n3d 6mo agoAs always in demo scene we speak about limits we put on ourselves. If the contest is "64K game" this probably won't fit - but not sure. Thus my question. 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.
- classichasclass 6mo agoMost emulators support .crt images, including large ones like these, so if this is their chosen distribution format they should work just fine on an emulator. They would also be okay on systems like the Ultimate 64, or real machines with EasyFlash or a 1541-Ultimate (which I use with my 128DCR).
- 6mo ago
- jonny_eh 6mo agoThe 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. More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738
- no-name-here 6mo agoComparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8 https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8 Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.
- wk_end 6mo agoWell, 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.
- no-name-here 6mo ago> 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 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.
- Tommix11 6mo agoThere are great CRT-shaders these day that would remedy this.
- qmr 6mo agoAmbitious. I wonder how many floppies it will be.
- haspok 6mo agoThe 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.
- bzzzt 6mo agoIt has to be less if they don't want to spoil the in-game 'insert disk 144' joke ;)
- faragon 6mo agoIIRC, the original CGA/EGA version was: 8x 360KB 5.25" disks, or 4x 720KB 3.5" disks.
- rasz 6mo agoAfaik Amiga was 4 720KB disks for 32 color version.
- snvzz 6mo agoDD floppies. Amiga's track format got 880KB out of these. 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.
- b112 6mo agoA 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. A neat project.
- andrea76 6mo agoThere had already been an attempt in 2023 https://www.lemon64.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island https://www.lemon64.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion
- kleiba 6mo ago> Unofficial conversion of the 1990 PC/Amiga game by Lucasfilm, developed using the D42 Adventure System from Out of Order Softworks. 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 https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en
- BuckRogers 6mo agoLooks 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.
- glimshe 6mo agoMy AMD 286 with a sound blaster absolutely destroyed a C64 in games. Gosh, I played Monkey Island VGA and Wing Commander on it.
- BuckRogers 6mo agoI’m not sure how well Wing Commander would have run on that machine. It had to have been borderline, slow or choppy. I played Wing Commander on a 386. 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.
- harmf 6mo ago[flagged]
- Subdivide8452 6mo agoI was just wondering why this process is not automated. Why do these graphics require redrawing? Resolution difference from EGA?
- vintermann 6mo agoThe C64 palette is completely different from the EGA palette. C64: https://lospec.com/palette-list/commodore64 https://lospec.com/palette-list/commodore64 Default EGA palette (which Afaik monkey island used): https://lospec.com/palette-list/color-graphics-adapter 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.
- rob74 6mo agoI 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 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.
- vidarh 6mo ago> this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color 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.
- sp8 6mo agoI 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!
- xecaz 6mo agoI 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.
- rob74 6mo agoGood 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.
- vidarh 6mo agoThe 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.
- Razengan 6mo agoGod, 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 :)
- whywhywhywhy 6mo agoWhen 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.
- Razengan 6mo agoI would have loved if Guybrush vs LeChuck were just something in the background lore, and you were an actual nobody pirate just hanging out with random characters like Kate Capsize, Stan, and all the other quirky one-shot NPCs and have side quests with each. Like imagine a side arc to overthrow Governor Phatt and so on :)
- doublerabbit 6mo agoThe 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.
- 6mo ago
- weinzierl 6mo agoThe 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?
- hansjorg 6mo agoThere was no native text mode on the Amiga at least.
- rob74 6mo agoI'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.
- selcuka 6mo agoText 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.