KestrelPi

This also feels like a 'we're very close' hint to me. My understanding is that credits usually come very late in the process. Because you don't want to have to keep maintaining them whenever someone else gets involved in the process. As I recall, the version of Psychonauts 2 I played didn't have credits in it yet. Septembarrrrrrrr

Each to their own I guess! I kind of like its energy, kind of has this cheap-glitzy sort of vibe that I definitely associate with Stan. I must have liked it okay, as I made a MIDI of it, back when that's a thing people did. I just checked, it's still up on https://legendofmi.com/downloads/midis/ ... I really do like the second section that comes in, it feels very like a lot of MI2 music to me.

OK, here's my Guybrush. I decided to take my favourite bits of all the guys brush. * A rounder, less long guybrush like in the first two games * Not too blond * scruff beard * CMI nose

I was wondering what to do with my evening... perhaps I'll try to draw a Guybrush.

Yeah, the CD version also had extended/varied circus music, and I think possibly ghost ship shuffle, too? And maybe I'm remembering it wrong but I think it had an extended version of the map music and the sneaking around music too. I was always sort of ambivalent about the variations, but it was the main version of the game I had access to in my teens so I became very used to hearing them.

Yeah, I was gonna say that I think the way those music files must have worked on the amiga, it would have taken up space. I mean, if the files were tiny then it wouldn't have made much sense to remove as much as they did. I don't recall the Stan theme being there either, and I don't think that one is very complicated to iMUSE. It must have been a space thing. It probably would be possible to find out how much space the music took up on those disks...

Perhaps - I always assumed it was more to do with space. The game was already on 11 floppies on Amiga, and they could probably save a bit of space making woodtick silent and getting rid of some of the other things they did. They definitely had some disk swapping going on during scenes where iMUSE instructions/transitions were in use, but maybe they felt that the effect would be lost for woodtick anyway. Weird to think how much disk swapping I put up with before I got the hard drive.

That's true, but I think also the nature of the music itself. It was more layered, more going on so even if they had got someone to convert them specifically I feel like the difference would have been more readily noticeable (and of course the Amiga version of MI2 has quite a lot of missing music)

Afterthought: Also important to note that with Amiga when we say 4 tracks what we really mean by that in implication is 4-sample polyphony. A sample might be a chord in order to fake higher polyphony, but you're only going to hear 4 samples at once. So if you listen to some of these tracks which have Marimba parts on amiga, if they do marimba trills with them on the same track, you can hear the samples cutting each other off as they move quickly from note to note, while that's less of an issue with someone using a soundcard on PC because while the marimba part might be on only 1 track, even cards in the fairly early 90s tended to have at least 8 note polyphony (I think the Adlib had 9-voice polyphony), and so their notes could overlap. I just listened to an Adlib emulated version, and indeed while sometimes you hear samples getting cut off by the polyphony limitation, it happens much less frequently than it does on the Amiga. That said, I'm not personally fond of the Adlib sounds, I think they have a bit of a mushy sound, and the amiga sounds mooostly hold up well to me in comparison. After-afterthought: Feel pretty lucky we don't have to worry about this stuff any more. ESPECIALLY since hardware limitations on audio have been a concern up to and including Tales.

The other thing I forgot to mention in my last post is that it sounds to me like the amiga version is using a few tricks to get around the track limitation where possible. So for example on the LeChuck Theme: I actually hear 5 layers here - a trombone, an occasional harmonising trombone, a organ layer, a bass line and a bass drum The harmonising trombone gets cut out a lot at weird moments so I suspect that is sharing a track with one of the other layers (sounds like the organ layer to me) to give the illusion of more layers than there are. The organ layer itself sounds like either they used a chord sample, or they're using modulation to create the illusion of chords where actually it's just a fast arpeggio, like is done in a lot of tracker/chip music. I can't quite tell which here. So I'm definitely hearing 'a more than 4 track tune that has been fairly well adapted to squeeze itself into 4 tracks' here, rather than one designed for 4 tracks in the first place. That said, back in the early to mid 90s I thought that the Amiga MI1 soundtrack was the definitive version for anyone that didn't have access to fancy soundcards. I'm not sure I feel as strongly about that now, as the old FM synth now admittedly have a certain nostalgic charm, but I think it was clear by the time that MI2 rolled along that the Amiga sound hardware was no longer keeping up with the needs of the soundtrack:

It was definitetly limited by the four channels in places. For example the main theme has flute harmonies that just don't exist in the PC version. And hear how much The Journey struggles to fit in the marimba part. I'm not thinking of the Stan theme, though incidentally I don't mind the MI1 CD theme at all. I know it's not by the big 3 but I'm still quite fond of it. I think it's massively underrated. Has a particularly nice B section. But you are right there aren't any missing tracks in the first game, I misremembered that. Still, some of the ones that are there are harder on the ears than I remember.

While I have great fondness for the Amiga music as it's the first one I played, as I listen to the themes with fresh ears I still think they're slightly held back by the 4 track limitation. I think it's also missing a few tunes? It's definitely managed better than in MI2 though, where a lot of times the music is just gone, or really quite mangled on the Amiga trying to crunch it into 4 tracks. Hard to knock it though, because I found it very inspiring at the time.

Seeing all these pieces of fan art in different styles is really inspiring for me because it really goes to show how you can really go quite out there with stuff and still the thing is recognisably Monkey Island. If we get more Monkey Island I'd love it if every time it was a chance for a new artist to put their spin on it.

Yes, I think we can be pretty confident they're not just going to show 10 different chapter title screens. 😄Especially since the wording from devolver is: It would sorta be an anticlimax if next monday they post 'And here's the second cool thing we're gonna share... another chapter card!' If I were to predict some of the things they miggght share: A sneak peak of how the dialogue/inventory/UI/controls work??? Some more of the music? More animation stuff?

Yeah, I feel like they could have done something with a having the bits of scroll swoop in, but then again, haven't basically all those screens so far in previous games been static? I don't specifically remember for tales.

Oh yeah well I mean I've played classical guitar since very early, and have since picked up other styles so I know my way around, but I'm just not very much of a performer in general, I was always more interested in writing than playing, so I mean that I tend to be happier now to go to samples than I used to be when I'm not so confident in my playing. Besides, it's surprising how much stuff sounds like a guitar if you perform it right and just stick it through guitar rig

If, as I feel, they're trying to reference The Journey music with this version (just like they referenced the LeChuck theme for the part 1 card in CMI) then I guess the preceding scene to this might take place on a boat. At least, Michael Land seems fond of the theme as it gets used in Tales quite a bit.

I think that was definitely true in '97 but less so now. It depends a bit on the style, but I've cobbled together some fairly convincing guitar work on samples when I don't think my playing is up to the job. I do think it struggles with styles with a lot of complicated finger work, though.

Anyway so I put MI2 Guybrush through a face depixelizer

They had a couple of spare spaces so Spaff asked if anyone on the old forum/Discord mod team wanted to come along. In the end, 2 of us did. I ended up staying in SF for about a week after, and got a sneaky little peek at a bunch of stuff.

If the release date is Talk Like A Pirate Day... Monday 19 September then uuhhh I would say this is a countdown. Including this one but not including the 19th, there are 10 Mondays left. That's 10 little mini clips for them to plan. Put it this way... I no longer think it's November, because that would mean they'd be doing this for like 20 weeks up to release which feels like an awful lot of tidbits to release. But 10? Nice round number? Mm, that's believable. (alternatively believable, on the 19th Sept they drop the release date as Thursday, for day and date with Switch store)

There was. I went on that trip and from what I remember I think there were like... 2 guests who had actually paid for the tier, then a couple more who won a contest to go along, and then a couple of us got invited to go along. It's the sort of thing that could have been pretty awkward, done wrongly, but literally the whole of the studio showed up and everyone was just so welcoming and generous with their time. And you could feel just by being there how much their making efforts to be a diverse and welcoming studio had done for their whole vibe. Everyone just genuinely was enjoying each other's company but also being super welcoming to any new person who crossed their path. I had someone I knew who was reasonably local to it drive me down to the campground and they were going to just drop me off and leave me to it, but instead they ended up staying a few hours, played some board games, tie dyed a shirt with us just because they thought it would be nice to let them hang out a bit before leaving, it was that lovely kind of comfortable, big-hearted thing that I think really defines what DF is as a group of people.

No, I've heard this in a couple of places, but he just said 'live' which I would intepret to mean they used as many live instruments as was practical to do.

Yeah, I love the SWAM stuff! It's like MT32's technology but with all the advantages of modern processing power. I used a SWAM clarinet on this piece.

Just in the background in the right ear there we get that bassoon sound that reminds me a lot of the Curse soundtrack, and of course we also heard in the first trailer.