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Hey all, I thought it could be fun to post and maybe receive requests for images generated by the amazing Dall-E AI. Here's an example of what it created with a Grim Fandango screenshot from the Land of the Living: This set what instead generated from the input string "An oil painting of a mad scientist, his nurse wife, their disturbed son and the two tentacle family pets: And last but not least some odd-looking variations on Guybrush and Elaine: Hope it is acceptable to open such a thread here, personally I'm so excited about this stuff, feel free to request something LucasArts related if curious about it

Appropos of Return using the old logo instead of what the SEs and Tales went for, I decided to make matching ones for those games.

I would not overthink it, and play them in the order they were made! This color is a little dark but is otherwise exactly what I wanted the Tales of MI logo to look like, but LucasArts wouldn’t let us at the time, because it was the “old school” logo and didn’t reflect the current state of the brand. I was pretty sad that as a result it wasn’t allowed to match the rest of the series (other than the special editions). Makes me happy to see this again.

Here's the first one! It gets quite weird if we keep part of the text: Edit 1: Edit 2: Edit 3: It won't let me upload EMI's cover art due to not specified possible violations of terms. 🤔 Looks like even Dall-E hates it (I don't). This'll have to do: Edit 4:

I gave it another crack and made it a little lighter and closer to the original. Not perfect, but pretty close

By the time we get more info the conversation will have derailed so much that it really will be a Return to Monkey Island 😂

I just realize that my first two posts to these forums in over 14 years were about Thimbleweed Park and had nothing to do with RTMI. Sorry for being off topic, but I feel like everything has just been overanalyzed and I'm dying for new information. A few more screenshots, a gameplay video, or something would be lovely!

@Laserschwert You might be interested in this more than we both thought. Apparently, you can edit parts of an image by selecting an area and saying what you wanna do with it, for example here I've asked to simply remove Elaine's sword and keep the original background.

Yeah I struggled a little with the gradient overlay settings in Photoshop. A lot of my experience with the software is self-taught and just trying things to see what works. I wasn't quite able to get it lighter than this, though I'm sure there's a way for more savvy users to work it out. I'm glad you liked it otherwise!

I don't know... I just played it for the first time and I loved TP. In fact it made me wonder where I've been for the last few years... Really wished I had backed it from the beginning. When I started playing the in-jokes were turned off by default, so about an hour in I turned them on. And to be frank I thought it was strange that anyone would have complained that there were too many in the first place. Isn't that the type of game they were going for all along? It really does fit in with the story. I wish they were turned on by default, seeing as that was the way it was originally meant to be played. And speaking of story, I really liked it. I grew on me as I progressed and by the end I thought they did a great job planning it all out. And to give it a bit more context, I'm not normally into mysteries, murder plots, or generally any story that is a bit dark. I always loved Monkey Island (as it was fun and funny) and I really enjoyed DOTT (as it was also funny and cartoony), but I would initially stay away from serious or dark stories, such as The Dig or Grim Fandango. Eventually I ended up giving all of the LA adventure games a try, and was very pleasantly surprised, but it usually took some time for me to get into them.

What with recent talk about CMI's music implementation being iffy in ScummVM, I thought it might be worth trying to compile some of the known behavioral differences in the SCUMM games when comparing the original executable (as run in an emulator like DOSBox or, for you nuts out there, an actual old IBM or Amiga) to ScummVM's interpretation. I'm doing this mainly for my own benefit, as I get the impression certain folks are aware of more discrepancies than I am, but I'll kick things off with some that I know about: - Most obviously, ScummVM does not reproduce the original UI for things like pause state, "Are you sure you want to quit?" and Save/Load menus. In several of the games, the save menus were pretty generic, but Maniac Mansion for example gave you a unique image (Syd running away from Green Tentacle in v1, Green Tentacle's band jamming out in v2), and Last Crusade had a graphic representation of your IQ score. - In Maniac Mansion, saving was not allowed once you reached Dr. Fred's lab. Hitting F5 at that point brought up this text: "The Meteor has control of your computer and he won't let you save the game." Last Crusade similarly wouldn't let you save once you hit the Grail Temple, as an in-game sign warns. ScummVM lets you freely save your state in these final sequences. - Starting I think with Hit the Road, the games shipped with custom launchers that ScummVM bypasses. Unlike the creepy teal/purple one for configuring sound on Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle, these GUIs were visually designed in the flavor of the game. - Maniac Mansion NES is rather graphically glitchy, most noticeably when characters climb thin air instead of the stairs to the third floor landing. ScummVM also makes it so that the steel security door is always open as it is in the PC versions. That is done to bypass the copy protection - a "crack" which became part of the official executable when bundled with DOTT - but there was never copy protection in the NES version. The security door was simply unlocked. - CMI's iMUSE isn't faithfully replicated in ScummVM. It appears that local hero AndywinXp corrected this within the last year. Note that folks who purchased CMI off of GOG/Steam will probably need to grab the latest dev build of ScummVM, as the version that comes bundled with the game almost surely predates the merge of this fix.

This is exactly the stuff I wish you could try! Please do feel free to also PM me here or on Discord so while you wait for access we can at least experiment together. I have a feeling this stuff could really help with your posters project!

Now I'm trash at reconstructing images, it's not my thing. but with a couple of iterations I've obtained this. I'm sure with your magic you could work wonders @Laserschwert.

Super weird that it Keeps turning MI2 LeChuck into Herman 😀 Also the tales cover gets very Dr Who-ish in its iterations I wonder why the AI has such a tendency for G Titles as well... Very very cool stuff 😀 thank you for sharing!

I love how the cocoon thing was interpreted as a sandwich by the AI and I'm literally in shambles looking at what it did for the Maniac Mansion painting.

Acceptable?! It's hilarious and captivating.

Having a closer look into the wavebank format again (its been years), it looks to me like the loop points are embedded in the wavebank not the soundbank as I said earlier. If that's the case then possible solutions are: Rename the MusicNew wavebank + soundbank to MusicOriginal so the game just uses them. I just had a quick test of this, it didn't work so I changed the internal names inside the wavebank and soundbank to MusicOriginal. This didn't work as there's a checksum in the soundbank, so I fixed that and...it worked. Except of course the wrong tracks play as they are listed in a different order in musicnew and musicoriginal. You could patch the loop points back into the wavebank after you've built it. If you use the unxwb tool with the -l and -v flags you'll be able to see the region offset for each sound. I think that's the start position for looped audio, its a 4 byte value. So you could make a tool to change those region offset values in the new wavebank.

I'm with Jake here. Every Monkey Island part built on the previous, just like every Star Wars part, regardless of chronology. The order in which they were made seems right for a marathon. You could of course play them as a countdown to ReMI in ToMI - EMI - CMI - LCR - TSoMI order. Think about it – that would save those games the memories to which you want freshest for last, like a slow trip in to the past! As to what ReMI is or isn't, chronologically, I don't think it really matters that much. Im fairly certain it has some overarching elements and only starts at the CotD. With Return to Monkey Island, Dave and Ron will undoubtedly try to carve a path for the series' ongoing existence. We might have another Monkey Island in a few years. That Monkey Island will be Monkey Island 7 and in retrospect, ReMI will by then have become "part 6" anyway. ♻️ For those whovians out there: In like everybody's head canon, David Tennant still is the 11th doctor regardless of them funking up the reincarnation timeline two doctors later, making him technically the 12th.

Idk if anyone follows Aaron Giles on Twitter, but he's recently been tweeting about his progress creating a native intepeter for the Lucasarts games called DREAMM (I believe this was mentioned in Mojo's interview). It seems to be going well, and he recently posted that he got CMI to work, which was the one game he thought wasn't possible to het running!

Thank you for setting up this list! I've just fixed this particular point in ScummVM development version. ScummVM is much more open about fixing/improving this kind of things, nowadays. There's quite a lot of work going into that direction, lately, and there's also a new toggle option that lets you choose between fixing original SCUMM bugs vs. keeping the original behavior, whenever this is possible (I'm also working on improving this part a bit more). Of course, this is a volunteer project, so improvements and fixes will always come from someone's spare time and work, in the end. And developers also need access to legitimate copies of the games: Zak is the only LucasArts title where the FM-Towns version can be bought at a sane price (on GOG), for example 😕 Anyway, I know that some original bug reports were closed quite abruptly, years ago, but nowadays it's worth it to report things again, in my opinion. Not that reporting things mean that they get immediately fixed (you still need someone's skills, time and motivation), but at least having them tracked somewhere (with enough context to reproduce/compare things) will always be helpful if someone is motivated in contributing a fix, at some point Anyway, thanks again for this list! I can't do much in the graphics, UI or sound area for example, but for some SCUMM script issues I'm always glad to help when I can.

Soon as Return was announced I started my own Monkey-a-thon (great name btw!) and finished a few weeks ago. As it was over ten years since I've played them (maybe more like 15 for some?) it was a great trip down memory lane. The first four were pretty strongly etched into my brain, but with Tales it almost felt like I never had played it before. My guess is that's just because I only played through Tales once when it first came out (compared to countless times for the others)... but on a positive note it felt like a whole new game! If nothing else, I'm grateful that the announcement of the new game inspired me to go back and replay these gems. Love them just as much as I did when I was a teenager.

I'm finally ready to start my Monkey-a-thon. I was hoping for a release date before I started but I'm getting a bit impatient waiting for news. My only issue is what order to play them. With Return being a Monkey Island game that takes place right after 2, my natural conclusion is to play 2 last. So I'm thinking of playing the Non Gilbert trilogy first (Curse, Escape and Tales) and then play the Ron Gilbert trilogy of Secret, Revenge and Return. Kinda like watching star wars is better out of order with episodes 4, 5, 6, 1, 2 & 3 Or... Do i just play 1 and 2, then play Return... then play Curse, Escape and Tales. The lack of clarity on what Return is makes it hard to plan a marathon...

Yeah I messed with it some more, no dice. I've looked into it a bit further, and apparently my hunch was correct. Although developers CAN create loops in the Soundback using XACT, some don't and instead rely on .wav files encoded with loop points using Wavosaur. Those appear to get lost as soon as they are re-encoded from the ADPCM format I initially extracted them from using your Extractor (great program btw, couldn't get this far without it). Basically, I still need to do that stupid amount of editing to put the loops back in, but at least now I only have to create one loop point instead of just artbitrarily looping different songs at varying lengths depending on guesswork around how long people genereally spend in each environment. If this all goes to plan, you could theoretically stay in the same location for hours, days, weeks, ETERNITY and never hear the faulty loop, which is what the original does. Thanks a lot for your help! I'll continue to test things until this works. I think it's worth it.

I had a look at that missing Elaine line, within ScummVM. Thanks to Serge for this wonderful analysis, by the way! Can anyone else owning that Amiga version confirm that the problem actually doesn't show up with ScummVM? (I have that version from the Limited Run Games set). Because it's fine here. Which is strange, because I can't see any intentional fix for that in ScummVM code; it looks like it work there because of some implementation difference, side effect, speed difference, luck, or whatever I fixed that Amiga palette bug last month, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lennSAcOqag (and if you want the original bug to be preserved, there's a new "Enable game enhancements" toggle for that in ScummVM UI). As for comparing the scripts of various Monkey2 variants, the ScummTR/ScummRP tools may be of some help, here (e.g. scummtr -g monkey2 -cw -h -of text.txt). I didn't really explore the Amiga version yet, but for example the Macintosh version fixes some original typos, and yeah, it looks like the legal team got involved in the Special Editions too (see LogicDeluxe's comments here; the Ultimate Talkie version lets you choose between the original and err… "updated" text). And there's also some untriggered text in the game (either because of a script error, or because they forgot to completely remove some ideas that they chose not to keep for the final game; in the case of Monkey2 I think it's often the latter). For example, type script 201 run in the ScummVM debugger just before you walk down the stairs to see Wally in LeChuck's fortress; you'll have some extra lines from Wally.

I'm deeply curious, but I would beg people to stick to spoiler tags as I'm still playing about where the story of Thimbleweed is going to go. After all, Monkey 2 also had a rug pulling ending, but while some people didn't like that, a lot of people, especially here DO like it, and are intensely interested in what that ending means for Return. My reaction to the ending of MI2 at the time was that it sort of blew my mind while being confused. As time went on I started noticing all of the stuff through the first two games that support (while not fully explaining) the ending, and now it's hard for me to imagine it ending any other way. If I'm going to get the rug pulled in some way with Thimbleweed i think I'm going to have to really get into my 10 year old brain and try to imagine if it would have blown my mind similarly. Anyway, they don't call me the Topic-Get-Back-Onner for nothing. Let me make a prediction: at some point during Return, a character will call Threepwood "Thimbleweed"

Ohhh… that. I totally knew that… totally… 👕 I beat #Mojole and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤💛💛🖤 🖤💚💛🖤💛 🖤💚💛💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

This I have troubles understanding - I don't know how you can say "the story was completely jettisoned at the end". That was the story... that was the story they came up with and had planned from the beginning. And knowing that ending, everything before that fits into it really nicely. It wasn't like they ran out of time or something. Anyways, nothing wrong with people not liking a story, but I guess I just don't understand the comments that make it sound like the story was going great and they just drove it off a cliff. As for the dialog between characters, Ron did admit that was something he should have thought about and included much earlier - my thoughts are that it was simply an oversight since doing full dialog trees wasn't something that was decided from the beginning. IMHO, Ron and Gary knew their characters so well having designed them and redesigned them countless times that they made the mistake of forgetting that the player doesn't know them as well as they do. I think Ron realized that it was a missed opportunity to develop the characters deeper... which is why he quickly patched it into the game.

And still managed to make it one of the greatest adventure games ever! Just dropped the point and click, amazing.

I think this is the coolest version of Lechuck's theme I have ever heard, and that's saying something

Well, I agree with some of that, but I don't know about that bit. Depends how you measure success, but arguably Psychonauts 2 is their first real commercial success and the rest just... did enough to keep them afloat, and had decent long term sales. One thing that I think was very striking about Double Fine is that in all their struggles, and all their never-quite-exploding in the way I would have loved, they basically managed to retain staff for WAY longer than most game companies, and only really had to consider redundancies on a couple of occasions, under extraordinary circumstances (and I think some of those people were subsequently re-hired). I think the selling to Microsoft feels like way less of an unpredictable move when you consider just how long they spent cruising under their own power, and how much of a struggle it must have been NOT to constantly be firing people and cutting back. Some people took some stories from Broken Age and wove it into a narrative of financial incompetence, but to me, the story of Double Fine is overwhelmingly one of extreme resiliance against all odds, and this Microsoft thing is just Tim coming to terms with the fact that if he keeps rolling the dice, he's going to hit snake eyes. I think Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, some but not all of Broken Age, and Psychonauts 2 have made me realise I do really like Tim's voice as a writer, and while I can't untangle the first two games enough to understand exactly what might be absent without him, I hope they manage to absorb enough of that DNA from the first two games to make his presence felt indirectly.

As Serge says, its not the audio data that contains the loops its the soundbank (xsb file). You can also build soundbanks in XACT, you drag a track from the wavebank into it and build cues and loop points but that will be a hassle. Again as Serge says, you would expect the game to just use the loops from the xsb so I would guess its one of: ADPCM blocksize - this can affect looping as the blocksize affects block alignment. Try lowering Samples per block on the wavebank. Your wavebank has the SYNC_DISABLED and BANK+ENTRYNAMES flags set - the original doesn't. On the wavebank in xact turn off 'friendly names' and turn on 'sync in-game data'. I havent built it to try but these should remove those flags.

I'm also expecting nothing less than greatness from this game. ❤️

Man, reading this just made me feel impossibly old and sad. I cannot relate to this at all, and it just shows how much the world of gaming has changed in the last twenty years or so. When I grew up it was normal for games to receive changes. All of the early LucasArts games were changed multiple times. Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken were both replaced, during their original lifespan, by different versions. Loom has more versions than I can even count without a reference. The Secret of Monkey Island was released in EGA, then a few months later a VGA version came out with completely new art assets throughout. They released the same game on CD a few years later and made changes to it. They made a further edition of it in 2009 which had further changes. None of this was considered sinister or oppressive. It was a company taking an existing product and trying to give new buyers a reason to purchase it. I guess we all have one specific version of a game that is the one we played first. That's the "correct" one in our own little subjective world. For me and Monkey Island, it's the EGA PC version with the internal speaker soundtrack. That's not the "best" version or the "canonical" version or any of that guff, it's just the one I experienced first, it's the one I'm nostalgic for. The existence of all those other versions doesn't invalidate it. If I want to revisit it, I can revisit it. But that EGA version I played also had an adlib soundtrack that I didn't get to hear the first time I played it. I heard that music later, and it's objectively "better" than the PC speaker equivalent. I enjoy that version of the theme music too. If we're going to talk about re-releasing old games then it's important to ask the question of whether the company should cater to me. There's an EGA version of this game with a PC speaker soundtrack, so surely it's no real work or effort on their part to add a toggle for those modes, is there? Well, setting aside the obvious fallacy that anything in game development is "easy" or involves "no real work", why should those modes necessarily be supported? Is the objective of a re-release to simply emulate the original? Which version of Monkey Island 1 is the original in this scenario, anyway? I mean, EGA was released first, but LucasArts themselves replaced it with a VGA version. So which one is the "original"? If you first played the VGA version, you might make the argument that the VGA version is "obviously better" because it has more colours. But that's a subjective opinion! The simple reality is that the game I'm nostalgic for still exists. I can still play it. I don't need them to re-release it, I already own it. And where does the nostalgia end? Is it still true to the original experience if I don't have to type DOS prompts in to start the game? Is it really the same without the copy protection? My opinion is that the objective of a re-release should be to bring something new or to update the art and the music in a way that might appeal to gamers who weren't lucky enough to be there the first time around. It's never to "replace the original". Fans of the original version(s) might love a re-release or they might hate it, but so what? You said yourself that Skunkape has done a "fantastic" job "on a technical level". Skunkape has also made the original versions of the games available. If this isn't enough for you, I wonder what is? It almost sounds like what you want is a version of the game that keeps the graphical improvements, because you've deemed those to be acceptable, but that also lets you choose which other aspects of the game are "original" or "updated". That's fine if that's what you want, but let's not pretend that's an objective desire for "the original". That's what YOU want. And again, it's okay to want that. But why do you expect to find it in anything except your original version that you fell in love with? I guess the above is the part that makes me feel so old. The part that makes me feel sad is the words you use here. "Backlash, less sales, an army of trolls review bombing and warning people". This is INSANITY. It's a video game. The people who made it are real human beings with feelings just like the rest of us, and I'm fairly sure they are doing this as a labour of love, a genuine good faith effort to re-release an old game to a new community, and they want everyone to be free to enjoy it in the most inclusive way possible. How are these things seen as negative? Some of the other things you have said allude to the problems in this discourse. "The Voodoo Lady's voice actor is a white lady in that game so she obviously has to go." "people calling each other racists or nazis in the community just because some people happen to prefer the old voice actor". These are not rational video game points of discussion. It's just a sad reflection on how successful the white supremacist propagandists have been in the last ten years. I'm not saying this about you, here, I just mean broadly across society. I think a lot of kids get introduced to concepts like this by extremely malicious individuals with a nihilistic bent who enjoy watching good people start to spout divisive rhetoric, because they've found a way to sell these concepts that is prima facie reasonable. Of course, it doesn't hold up to any real scrutiny. But this isn't the place for that debate, and if anyone tries to take it there they can expect to find this discussion diverted back on track quite sharply. We're all tired of these arguments. You said it yourself - "I saw that once, it was really stupid, I'd rather not watch the rerun thank you very much." I honestly think that this kind of comment is something people only really say when they're immune from the real-world negative consequences. When they are so hard-up for actual oppression, so far away from being a victim, that the only place they can find it is in a video game. I'm not trying to say anything bad about you, this isn't personal. Like I said, I'm just old, and I'm really, really sad.

Hi everyone! I wanted to pass a message from eriktorbjorn himself (who, by the way, is unable to register to this forum since it appears there's an issue which prevents people receiving confirmation mails). He recently merged a great feature which allows for disabling with a toggle some of the SCUMM improvements not found in the original interpreters. This can be done in the "Game Options" dialog (not in the global options dialog); you can find a list here https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCUMM/Game_Enhancements for details on what the setting covers now (for instance, the character spacing setting in Mac Indy3 has been incorporated into the toggle). I personally find this very cool, this is a great way to have some cool enhancements while still being able to lend a hand to purists and let them play something closer to the original experience.

This is a volunteer project, and as such, developers are allowed to work on whatever they feel most fun working with, all of this with its advantages and disadvantages of the thing. Also, LucasArts games are currently being worked on more than you would expect: there has been a SMUSH font rewrite last year which makes it pixel perfect, there have been lots and lots of fixes in the walk code for every single major SCUMM version (from v2 to v8), v7-8 font drawing routine is currently in the process of being overhauled with a version which makes it pixel perfect and which correctly wraps text, COMI sprite decoding routine saw a major bug being fixed, and don't even get me started on iMUSE... I do understand the frustration in seeing that developers apparently neglect or forget old bugs, I really do: I was one of those But: 1) it's simply not true that they are not working on SCUMM games anymore, it's just that every major developer is working on at least two engines at once, so (being an after work activity) they might just not always have time to deal with them; 2) if you are upset about a certain bug, maybe an ancient one which nobody seems to care about anymore, do what I did: learn how to do it, and do it yourself, because if you really are the only one who cares, nobody else is going to do it for you! I'm serious, not being sarcastic, insulting, or anything! It can be a good learning experience and rewarding for sure. Also, about this: I can see how from the outside the attitude might seem a little cold but rest assured, that is how pull requests usually work, after all they are just requests for code review for a new patch. Of course most of the comments are going to be request for fixing syntax, memory leaks, and whatnot, but that is to be expected: the project has to maintain a very high code quality since the application is actually used to ship games on Steam/GOG nowadays.

As I understand (someone correct me if I'm wrong), part of the savegame/pause UI is hardcoded and different for every game, and it would require a great amount of work (per game) to add all those quirks back in exactly the same way they were originally presented.

The book arrived today and it is utter crap. It is LITERALLY a printed version of a shitty archive.org scan. Money down the drain.