Torbjörn Andersson

That's ok, someone went into detail elsewhere: https://www.reddit.com/r/limitedrun/comments/1at3yoa/comment/kuj4o1g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button So apparently the Mac version of Loom wasn't included? Pity. I mean, it's not like it's some kind of holy grail or anything, but I and others have spent quite a bit of work lately getting it to run better in ScummVM.

Ah, that makes more sense. I thought you just meant the EGA version because that's the only additional thing I heard they had definitely promised would be included.

Even uncompressed, my copy of English EGA Loom is 2.2 MB. There wasn't even that much space to spare?

It didn't seem important to mention it, because I wasn't asking about the version. 😜 I hadn't heard of any effort to get additional versions included (I couldn't find any questions about it on LRG's Facebook announcements, and Twitter is walled off for me these days), so I just assumed it would be disappointing from a game preservation/playing point of view. That's why I asked if they had also managed to break it in some way. Either way, it doesn't bode well for their Maniac Mansion release. I was told they were informed about the GOG version being broken/cracked, but...

I can't tell from just the list of files, is there something wrong with Zak McKracken?

If I had bought it, I would have been right there with a receipt in one hand and a burning pitchfork in the other.

Ah yes, those have yet another tag for its version of the music, though the files still contain all (?) of the others. Though they're probably based on the MT-32 ones, because the instruments seem like a subset of it. At least in my copy of MI2 (which comes from the LucasArts Mac CD Game Pack), some of the Mac music is missing towards the end. ScummVM optionally falls back on using the Mac instruments with the MT-32 tracks, and it sounds good enough to me:

Which games in particular? ScummVM has supported the Mac instruments from Loom, Monkey Island 1, Monkey Island 2, and Fate of Atlantis for quite some time. A more accurate player for Loom, and a completely new player for Last Crusade appeared in the development version recently, so I'm hoping that means a Monkey Island 1 will follow. But I believe Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max also had custom Mac instruments, and those aren't supported at this time. I'm always hoping someone who has actually heard the real thing could check it out to see how accurate it is. At least in the games that use iMUSE, each piece of music can appear in several forms, each tagged with an identifier to specify what hardware it's intended for. The DOS versions of Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis have music tagged as ADL (AdLib), ROL (MT-32), and even some SPK (PC speaker). Day of the Tentacle has ADL, ROL, and GMD (General MIDI). In Sam & Max, everything appears to be simply tagged as MIDI. Based on some very quick testing, so feel free to correct me.

Err... we do? Maybe I've listened to sub-par recordings, but the ones I've heard didn't impress me. It just sounded a bit... I don't know... metallic? Toylike? I like the MT-32 and AdLib versions better. I'm not sure where I rate the Macintosh version, because I honestly don't know how close ScummVM's emulation of it is. (There have been improvements to the sound in earlier Mac SCUMM games recently, so I'm hoping that one will be next.)

The most expensive collection of games I've come across on eBay wasn't LucasArts, it was a $155,000 collection of Infocom games: https://www.ebay.com/itm/115558782739 I know there have been single games going for more than that, but nothing I've ever had any reason to search for. I don't begrudge them though, because that one probably does belong in a museum. The most ridiculous one, that I don't know if it's still up, was a mere EUR 45. It's the Monkey Island 30 Anniversary Anthology PC Collection Limited Run... Styrofoam Inlay?

Some time ago, I was creating replacement copy protection tables for some LucasArts games. Some because I couldn't be bothered to fetch the manual every time I needed them, some because the second-hand copies I bought of the games didn't include the manuals at all. These cleaned up scans would have been really useful then! 😁 Though since I took the somewhat unorthodox path of using HTML and hand-crafted SVG images (something I had never done before), and then ran them through a PDF printer, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. If anyone else finds them useful, they and the source code I used is on GitHub: https://github.com/eriktorbjorn/lucasarts-protection-sheets/

Now I'm more worried than ever that they're going to enshrine that horribly cracked version of Maniac Mansion that's sold on GOG and Steam as a "Collector's Edition". The one where you can guess your way past every keypad puzzle, because they will accept any code as long as it's either correct or the last digit is wrong. It's easy enough to fix, and in fact ScummVM 2.5.0 will repair the crack automatically. (I believe the next version of DREAMM will do so as well.) But GOG includes an older version of ScummVM, so that's only somewhat helpful... (Hey, Lucasfilm! You wouldn't steal a car, would you?!)

Sounds like they got all of this from the FM Towns version. It came on two CDs: One with the game and one with the audio drama. The audio drama disc has six tracks: The audio drama in Japanese and English, and four tracks with music from it. Other than the Japanese drama, the contents is the same as my English audio drama CD, though they seem to have cranked up the volume a little on the FM Towns disc. The game disc has one data track (with the English and Japanese versions of the game), and eighteen audio tracks. The first eight are the melodies from the Swan Lake ballet (the overture isn't used in the game though, as far as I remember?). Then another eight with a different version of the same eight. As you say, they don't sound as good. The way the game uses them seems to be that it first plays one, and then loops the other one. Unlike the EGA version, the music rarely stops. The last two tracks are the Indiana Jones theme and the Zak McKracken theme. They are used for an "upcoming attractions" non-interactive demo included on the disc. (The TurboGrafx-16 version also used audio tracks for the music, but only has one version of each melody.) So I guess the only thing they didn't include from the FM Towns version was the actual game, and the Zak McKracken theme? 🤦‍♂️

Well, that's really disappointing then. If I had bought it, it would have been solely on the promise of the EGA version. It's nice that they did include the audio drama of course, but that should really have been in the GOG/Steam versions as well because it's mentioned in the manual. Out of curiosity, what did they mean by "original soundtrack"? I assumed it was either the audio tracks from the FM Towns or TurboGrafx-16 versions (I think the only difference is that FM Towns has two versions of each track?), or the music from the audio drama. (I bought a copy of the Seiji Ozawa recording of the Swan Lake ballet. I hear that's what they used for tempo reference for Loom, so to me that is the original soundtrack.)

Perish the thought! (Though owning Loom and not being able to play it sounds pretty awful to me. 😁) A fellow ScummVM developer has promised to check for me once he gets his. I'm still hoping the first guy was mistaken. Though the version I'm really hoping they included is the 16 color Macintosh one. I'm not saying it's the best one, but there's been quite a bit of progress on it (and, more noticeably, the Mac version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) in ScummVM lately, and it would be nice if more people were table to test. Or even help fixing the known bugs. (Hey, I can dream!)

I read a post on Mastodon from someone who had received his copy, but it seems to indicate that only the VGA talkie version was included on the USB drive. I hope that's incorrect because even I, who didn't buy the thing, would find that pretty disappointing.

Ron Gilbert tweeted a while back that he'd love to remaster Maniac Mansion. But personally, I'd be happy enough if someone could just fix the version that's currently sold. Because at least the enhanced version on GOG is cracked in a way I can't imagine Lucasfilm Games themselves would ever have done.

Not if you trust the back of the Escape From Monkey Island box. Though for whatever reason, the promise of "more monkeys than the three previous Monkey games combined!" was toned down for the PlayStation 2 version.

Thanks, something very much like that! (Though it never even occurred to me to draw Guybrush as Charlie Brown. Nice touch!)

Thanks! I got the lyrics and music from https://tomlehrersongs.com/ (which will apparently be taken down by the end of 2024, so you can bet I've archived everything I could from it!), and hacked the ScummVM source code to intercept the text from the first Stan scene. (I had a convenient savegame for it.) Then I spent some time fiddling with the timings, recorded a silent version of it, added a few title cards, and mixed it all together. Edit: Attahching a text file didn't work nearly as well as I hoped, so here's the contents of the file instead. Of course, you still need to be comfortable with compiling ScummVM and understanding diff files... And it's possible that tabs have been converted to spaces, so some editing may be required. The basic idea is to intercept when Stan is saying "I'm Stan ..." and instead insert your own text with an appropriate duration. The script pointer is then moved back to the start of the instruction so that it will still see "I'm Stan" the next time and insert another line of text. diff --git a/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp b/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp index da0045ef237..1f20a5f5328 100644 --- a/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp +++ b/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp @@ -1855,6 +1855,95 @@ void ScummEngine_v5::o5_pickupObject() { } void ScummEngine_v5::o5_print() { + static int songIndex = 0; + + const struct { + int duration; + const char *msg; + } messages[] = { + { 550, NULL }, + + { 120, "There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium^" }, + { 120, "^and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium^" }, + { 110, "^and nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium^" }, + { 120, "^and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium^" }, + { 120, "^europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium^" }, + { 120, "^and lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium^" }, + { 120, "^and gold and protactinium and indium and gallium^" }, + + { 50, NULL }, + + { 130, "^and iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium." }, + + { 110, NULL }, + + { 120, "There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium^" }, + { 120, "^and boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium^" }, + { 120, "^and strontium and silicon and silver and samarium^" }, + { 140, "^and bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium." }, + + { 350, NULL }, + + { 120, "There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium^" }, + { 120, "^and phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium^" }, + { 120, "^and manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium^" }, + { 120, "^dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium^" }, + { 120, "^and lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium^" }, + { 110, "^palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium^" }, + { 130, "^and tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium^" }, + + { 70, NULL }, + + { 120, "^and cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium." }, + + { 130, NULL }, + + { 120, "There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium^" }, + { 120, "^and also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium^" }, + { 120, "^and argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium^" }, + { 120, "^and chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium." }, + + { 140, NULL }, + + { 180, "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard^" }, + + { 30, NULL }, + + { 160, "^and there may be many others but they haven't been discavard." }, + + { 500, NULL }, + { 0, NULL } + }; + + + if (vm.slot[_currentScript].number == 56 && memcmp(_scriptPointer, "\x03\x0fI'm Stan", 10) == 0 && messages[songIndex].duration > 0) { + const byte *oldPtr = _scriptPointer - 1; + + vm.slot[_currentScript].delay = messages[songIndex].duration; + vm.slot[_currentScript].status = ssPaused; + + const char *msg = messages[songIndex].msg; + _actorToPrintStrFor = getVarOrDirectByte(PARAM_1); + + if (msg) { + char buffer[120]; + + buffer[0] = 0x0f; + strcpy(buffer + 1, msg); + + _scriptPointer = (const byte *)buffer; + decodeParseString(); + } else { + stopTalk(); + } + + _scriptPointer = oldPtr; + songIndex++; + + o5_breakHere(); + return; + } + // WORKAROUND bug #13374: The patched script for the Ultimate Talkie // is missing a WaitForMessage() after Lemonhead says "Oooh, that's // nice." so we insert one here. If there is a future version that

I'm always amazed by people who can draw. I had this picture in my head of Ron Gilbert (or at least his "grumpy gamer" avatar) and Guybrush in a Lucy/Charlie Brown style "football gag"... and this was the only bit of it that came within a country mile of what I imagined:

Not my kind of music, I'm afraid... So I put this one together instead:

Nothing very exciting, I'm afraid.

I don't have any DOSBox savegames near that spot, but if I understand it correctly the game has a helper script that implements three different operations: Remap all palette colors to the same color. Remap one palette color to another. Reset all palette color mappings. The flash is implemented as a series of "remap all colors" plus "remap color 0 (presumably black) to another". This looks fine at the voodoo lady's place, where large parts of the image is black and there is a symmetrical black border around the scene. But here only a few small bits are black, so it looks weird. In the CD version it calls the helper script with the same parameters, but the "remap all palette colors" operation is implemented as some kind of hard-coded "brighten/darken palette" thing, and the "remap one color" operation is ignored. So it's almost certainly not a ScummVM bug. From what I've seen on YouTube, the EGA version looked fine here, so I'd say it was a regression in the VGA floppy version that was fixed again in the CD version.

Unless there's a bug in ScummVM that I've never heard of before, I guess I have to award this one to the VGA CD version: The flash when the voodoo lady disappears is different between the two versions as well, but there I couldn't say which one looks the best.