Torbjörn Andersson

I don't know. Agent Slenderball looks a bit off-model to me...

"The soundtrack is still in progress" That's great news! I can't really justify buying the game (maybe if there had been a Linux version, but that's probably never going to happen), but I've been waiting for a chance to buy the soundtrack for the past... 14 years? It's been that long? If I really want to play the games, I think I'll stick with the original versions. They can be run in Linux by using Wine... with the occasional nightmare-inducing glitch.

I still buy CDs, but customs have gotten really stingy about adding fees every time (it used to be just if you were unlucky) so it's been a while since I ordered anything from the US. I cannot understand the fascination with vinyl, though. My memory of that is that all my favorite LPs would eventually get scratched. One got warped when I left it on the turntable on sunny day. (One old 78 rpm record shattered when I accidentally dropped it, though I guess that was shellac, not vinyl.)

Thanks! I didn't realize that it was used for the main menu, though that makes its omission all the more remarkable of course. Here's to hoping that it can be added some day, in spite of the problems you mentioned with some other services.

The game most likely won't be released for anything I have, but if the soundtrack is finally released (14 years after the "Season 3 Soundtrack Waiting Thread" started on the Telltale Community forum), that will definitely be worth buying. At that point, I guess the only thing I will still be missing is that nice music at the beginning of "Bright Side of the Moon", where Sam somehow figures the whole thing out. Oh well. 😁

Once upon a time, I would have used Wine to unpack those installers in Linux. But these days, the "innoextract" command line tool seems to be doing a good job too. Even if that'll get you a bunch of files that I assume are only used during the installation, as well as the installed files themselves. I think the official web page for it is https://constexpr.org/innoextract/ Since the file format is apparently well understood, I guess there's no technical reason that DREAMM couldn't install the games directly from those installer files. But I haven't heard anyone say it does, and I've never tried it.

I tried that savegame with the Italian version of the game I got from GOG, using 3.0b12 under Linux. I get sound, the texture isn't missing, and it hasn't crashed so far, knock on wood. Unfortunately the only Italian I know is a few musical terms, so I can't really test it any further. Figuring out which menu item to use to even load the savegame was stretching the limits of that knowledge! 😁

These days there's also DREAMM, Aaron Giles's "bespoke emulator for LucasArts games". Unlike ScummVM, it emulates enough of DOS, Windows and FM Towns to run the original EXE files which in theory means it should run EMI without bugs. Though I've had problems with some lines of dialog being skipped. Your mileage may vary.

Someone on Facebook said he had complained to LRG about the Full Throttle box, only to be told that it was meant to be that way. Which I guess means that LucasArts got it wrong through several re-releases, not to mention within the game itself, but now LRG finally got it right...? 🤷‍♂️

So both their Full Throttle and their Grim Fandango boxes came out looking much darker than the original ones? That's weird. Consistently weird, but still weird.

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!)