ATMcashpoint

Another update: after contacting Limited Run Games' support on their website, I've received an email with a digital downloadable copy of the contents of the USB drive. Hooray!

I was wrong - some of the pages have numbers. Many, however, do not, and those that do have numbers appear to always be left-hand pages for some reason. On a lot of pages the lower area (where the page numbers are, when present) is taken up by factoids at the bottom of the page, but even where this is absent the page numbers aren't always included.

There are no page numbers, but it's pretty thick! The lion's share of the book is devoted to MI1 and MI2. CMI gets several pages of interviews, EMI even less, and TMI barely any pages. I was a little disappointed to see that nobody who worked at Telltale was interviewed about TMI, aside from Dominic Armato and Chuck Jordan (who mostly was working on The Devil's Playhouse rather than TOMI during that period, if memory serves). But the MI1 and MI2 sections are very interesting, and I feel like clamming up about them for now to avoid further spoilers!

Further update: Disk 22 appears to be blank. Also, I inserted the USB drive into my computer a second time and now it's refusing to read at all, much like the issue @Rum Rogerswas having. Fortunately, I copied all the data off of it that I could beforehand.

My copy arrived today. I can confirm that part of the USB stick is corrupt. The USB stick is supposed to contain the EGA, VGA floppy, and Amiga versions of MI1; the DOS, Amiga, and Macintosh versions of MI2; CMI; EMI (for PC, not PS2); and TOMI (probably the DVD version since it's labeled "no DRM") . All of the floppy versions of the games are supposed to come with both raw disk images and Kryoflux images included. However, EMI is corrupt, as is the Macintosh version of MI2 (both raw images and Kryoflux data). The CDs only include the SEs of MI1 and MI2. However, the version of EMI included there seems to be OK, thankfully. Also, the EGA and VGA floppy versions of MI1 are labeled as "5.25" and "3.5" disk versions for some reason, though they appear to work fine. And the vintage MI1 CD version does not appear to be included, perhaps because it was felt to be "included" already in the MI1 SE. On a much happier note, the book included with the Anthology set is absolutely awesome. For example, aside from the "El Carlo" thing - which is part of a larger design document apparently included in full, which also includes Largo's original name, "Lord Jack" - there's also a memo from the LucasArts testing department about MI2, written by the late Judith Lucero. Ron posted the first page of this as a memorial when she passed away, but the full thing is included here. Judith Lucero was also interviewed for the book before she passed, which is very cool.

Oh no! I hope you can find a way to open it. Have you tried using it on a different computer?

Nah, the Voodoo Priest was originally supposed to be featured more in the game just as his own character, as I understand it. There are two different versions of his office in LeChuck's Fortress that were cut from the game. One version was a black-and-white room sketch shown off in the 30th anniversary source code stream - that version had voodoo ingredients beginning with every letter in the alphabet, as part of a puzzle where Guybrush apparently had to combine them in the right order to form a phrase. The other version shows up in the MI2 SE concept art gallery as a colored painting. This version is simpler, and apparently just had a large screen that Guybrush could hide behind at one point, as well as an altar of some sort, where perhaps he would spread the "more voodoo crap" inventory item that was obtainable at the time of the non-playable demo from the shipping crate that Guybrush arrived in. There's also a black outline of a newt associated with this second version of the room. And LeChuck's office door has a small hole in the base. Plus the original background of the office door was mirrored in layout, but when it was flipped for the game three of the runes on the wall next to the door were kept in their original orientation. Those same runes (shaped like "C-B-M") show up on the cut close-up background of LeChuck's desk as seen from above. I wonder if the original puzzle to get in LeChuck's office involved making a spell for Guybrush to become a newt ("I of Newt"?) and use it to crawl under the door, at which point the GUI maybe went away and the cut close-ups of LeChuck's office were used as backgrounds. Finding the combination for LeChuck's door on the top of LeChuck's desk, Guybrush would leave the office and become human, then press the "C-B-M" runes (as in Commodore Business Machines, makers of the Amiga - "Friend", for a LOTR riff there) to open the door. The change to the voodoo priest's office background suggests this hypothetical puzzle may have been simplified at one point (i.e., probably making the spell) before being cut entirely - which also would have allowed for the LeChuck closeups to be cut, since the puzzle they were used for would be gone. As for El Carlo, I do wonder if part of the joke was going to be that LeChuck was a ghost and his brother was a zombie, for a family of various undead types.

Maybe that's why it shows up on the back of the MI2 Kixx XL box from the UK, which always made me wonder: And, thanks to the original game backgrounds in the MI2 SE concept art gallery, we know that Peter Chan's painting of LeChuck's office in MI2 was labeled "El Carlo's office" on the original art: This definitely clears up some mysteries, I'd say.

Just got a response on Twitter: "The production emails were sent using our active mailing list, if you've not opted in you may not receive those. Shipping notifications will go out as the team is packing out orders though and those are not tied to the newsletter mailing list. -SE" That explains why I wasn't receiving emails from Limited Run Games even in my spam folder (except when I changed my password). Hopefully at some point that "item shipped" email does show up in my inbox...

Since I ordered the box set a year ago I have not received a single email from Limited Run Games. Ever. I logged into their website and it still says my order is "in production" and yet to be shipped. I'm worried that they won't send me anything and I'll have missed my one chance to buy it because of bureaucratic incompetence.

I have copies of some of the sell sheets for Rebel Assault II and Jedi Knight. The former might prove useful as another reference for the box art, while the sell sheet I have for the latter features the early "Dark Forces"-style logo and the early landscape-orientation box art painting by Peter Chan of Kyle with a blue lightsaber fighting Jerec.

I have all those issues so I can provide scans if you want, @Laserschwert.

OK, great! Just let me know if there's anything you need me to rescan or something.

I should mention that I have a copy of LOOM FM Towns with the original box and manuals, @Laserschwert, if you want scans of those and don't have them already. In fact, as I recall I think I sent you scans of them years and years ago, but if you need new scans, just let me know.

Update: I mentioned on the ScummVM bug tracker that I would prefer it if ScummVM emulated the original, possibly buggy Mac font spacing in Indy 3, and eriktorbjorn very graciously agreed to see if it could be done as an option. That sort of incredible generosity reminds me that ScummVM is indeed a labor of love. My hat is off to him.

The release notes for the new ScummVM release point out there's more support for the high-resolution Macintosh fonts in games like Last Crusade and LOOM - if it was there already in daily builds I must have missed it, but as a Mac gamer back in the day I quite appreciate it. And after I filed a bug report they put in the moveable Practice box in the LOOM Macintosh port, which is quite excellent! On the other hand, the Mac high-res fonts on some screens in Last Crusade (eg, the Grail Diary pages) are not pixel perfect in ScummVM, and the comments on the bug ticket say they have no intention of making them be so, because the original implementation of the font kerning "looks bugged" apparently. Maybe? But I do wish accuracy to the original interpreter was a goal ScummVM strove for all the time, rather than picking and choosing.

There was an Alt-F5 option to use the original Save/Load GUIs (though not the Game Paused bars etc.) in SCUMM games rather than the ScummVM default, but it's been broken for one to two years now. (And it was already inferior to the fancy "use original Save/Load GUI" checkbox in the startup menu for Sierra games, but I'm digressing.) On Discord a while back Sev said it was probably just a bug that hadn't been fixed. However, it's been languishing in the bug list for over a year now without anybody bothering to fix it. Honestly, most of the bug fixes and feature improvements to ScummVM are now happening on the Sierra side. The LucasArts games are treated as basically "done", even when there are still significant improvements that could be made, or even just notable bugs like the one above that are left unfixed.

Not to mention that current daily builds of ScummVM on Windows default to an OpenGL rendering mode where you have no way whatsoever to simply take a 320x200 resolution game and upscale it to 2X, 3X, etc. with the window fitted to match. Instead it resizes the game screen by default into a very large and distorted resolution, around 1152x864. And the only way to resize the game window is through the extremely imprecise method of using Windows' resize function to make it into something vaguely near the resolution you want. So you either get horrible pixel stretching, with stuff like the pixelated cursors no longer fitting 1:1 on the background art - along with very noticeable letterboxing/windowboxing if you try to resize it - or (if you use the "Center" option in the launcher graphics settings) a tiny 1x window swallowed up in a void of black. Apparently the way to change this (as I just figured out after some frustrated tinkering) is to go into the launcher options and select "SDL Surface" as the render mode rather than OpenGL, which allows you to have game windows with pixel-perfect scaling. But the result is that the default presentation of LucasArts games in current ScummVM builds looks absolutely atrocious. I don't get at all why this is the default, and there isn't really any explanation in the launcher to help people find the better rendering options.

I mentioned it in a #monkey-meetings chat on Discord a couple months ago and was told by Sev that it was a bug and I should file a bug report. Which I duly did, only to have it closed a couple days later because it was a duplicate of a (still-open) bug ticket that was already a year old at that point.

NB: I'm having trouble getting a password-recovery email for my usual account (the problem seems likely to be on my email server's end) so I'm using this backup I created when the forums first came back online and the recovery of ancient accounts had issues. - ATMachine ScummVM used to have an Alt-F5 hotkey that would bring up the original Save/Load menu. This has stopped working in current builds (including one I just downloaded today). This means, for instance, that you can't see the "enable 3D acceleration" joke in the CMI menu. So in at least one case actual game content is being lost as a result. ScummVM's implementation of Sierra SCI and AGI games has a check-box option in the launcher menu to enable the original Save/Load GUI. Even when Alt+F5 worked, ScummVM never had anything so intuitive or easy to use for SCUMM games - it was always relegated to an obscure keyboard command, which now doesn't even work. It's a clear example of the way SCUMM support has lagged behind games from Sierra etc. in the last few years. I'm glad to see other people besides me are taking an interest in this stuff.