Torbjörn Andersson

The way I figured it, this is the thread where we take our moderate opinions ("Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would have been better if it didn't rely so much on pixel-hunting, mazes and optional-but-sometimes-hard-to-avoid fighting") and restate them in the most blunt way you can think of ("Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is without a doubt the worst Indiana Jones game ever"), all in good fun. I mean, we do still like and respect the games, right? Even the ones we don't like quite as much as some of the others?

Well, I'm grateful for them. I didn't get to play them back in the day (my Mac Plus should have been able to handle Loom and Last Crusade, but I was too busy playing Infocom games; I have no regrets), but now they are how I can at least play one 16-colour version of Last Crusade, or see that scene in Fate of Atlantis that for whatever reason has three different versions. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for anyone else back then, I guess), both versions of The Secret of Monkey Island in the picture are 256 colours. (I did see the Mac version of Full Throttle in an on-line auction not too long ago, but someone else wanted it more than I did. Oh well.)

My unpopular opinions: Insult sword fighting was clever in the first Monkey Island game, but really quite unnecessary in the others. The Monkey Island 1 "red herring" puzzle was much harder than the Monkey Island 2 "monkey wrench" one. The Amiga versions were inferior to, or at best on par with, their DOS counterparts. (There! I said it!) Day of the Tentacle is a much funnier game than Sam & Max Hit the Road.

One thing I found interesting is that while most Mac versions (that I've seen) stick pretty close to their DOS counterparts, Loom and particularly Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were much more different in appearance. I don't know if you had anything to do with either of those two, though.

I asked it to recreate an object from the Infocom version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but all I got was nightmare fuel. Now I'm too scared to even try "laser-assisted monkey wrench", "ultra-plasmic vacuum awl", "molecular hyperwave pincer", or any other of the weird tools you found scattered throughout the game. 😛

It's a nice puzzle, but I would probably have been more impressed with it had I not seen an almost identical one years earlier, and I though it was better integrated there. (I wish it hadn't been so unforgiving, though: You only have a limited number of moves before you run out of air, and you have to get through a small maze.) That's not to say they ripped it off, just that it was hard not to see the parallels. The game, in case anyone was wondering, is Sorcerer by Infocom.

That's a matter of taste. If you have 2.5 hours to spare, you can listen to two guys comparing the EGA and VGA versions here: Me, I'm on "Team EGA". I don't care about the minor palette differences, but I think the DOS version sounds better than the Mac version. The only replacement music I've used is the Seiji Ozawa recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It seemed appropriate, since apparently that was used as tempo reference when adapting the music for the game. Though after all the replaying I had to do to get that, and other things, working properly in ScummVM, it'll probably be a while before I want to play through the game from start to finish again. 😛

By the way, some time ago I made some comparisons between the graphics of the different versions, that some may find amusing. First the three different graphics styles. I don't remember if I used the VGA or FM Towns version for the rightmost column but for these scenes it shouldn't make much of a difference. (The FM Towns version runs at 320x240 pixels rather than 320x200 pixels, though it's mostly just more wasted black space at the bottom of the screen.) The middle column is the TurboGrafx-16 version, showing both EGA and VGA style graphics, as well as the missing tree in the foreground of one scene. Another comparision, this time of one particular scene. The VGA talkie version really... stands out? And finally one where I added the CGA and Macintosh black-and-white modes. I think the CGA mode is auto-generated from the 16-color graphics. I know the black-and-white mode (only available for the 16-color Mac version) is.

That's the big question, isn't it? I haven't even played all versions. 😀 TL;DR - The EGA version is the one I find myself returning to. In some scenes, the VGA graphics look quite nice, but there are other scenes where I think something was lost in translation. I like that we have the VGA version, because it's almost as if two teams were given the same screenplay, sets and costumes, and were asked to make a game. I just dislike that it's the only available versions these days, because to me it's not the best one. And now the long, rambly version... Most of the Looms I've managed to track down, I've gotten from eBay. The only version available for purchase nowadays is the VGA talkie one. I got EGA Loom from the LucasArts Classic Adventures collection, and Mac Loom from the LucasArts Mac CD Game Pack and it remains my favorite. It's apparently a lot easier to find the German version, but I don't want that. The English TurboGrafx-16 version used to be reasonably priced, but seems to have gone way up since I got mine. (The Japanese version was cheaper last time I checked. I don't speak Japanese.) Extracting the game from the CD so that ScummVM can play it is also a bit of work. The FM Towns version has always been horrifyingly expensive, so don't ask me how an affordable one suddenly popped up in an auction one day. It didn't include the box (which probably made the more insane collectors turn up their noses), but it did have both the game and audio drama discs, and the instructions/hint books. The only version that's easy to find is the VGA talkie one. The one sold on GOG and Steam is packaged differently than the original CD, but should otherwise be identical. The EGA version is, as far as I know, the only version that has the Overture that plays when using the Roland MT-32 music. But since this is just a black screen with the word "OVERTURE" and the Swan Lake theme playing, you're not missing that much if you don't see it. The original 16 color Mac version is close to the EGA version, but uses a high-resolution font for the text and notes. The music sounds different too. The instruments are digitized, but not very fancy ones. I don't know how well ScummVM handles it, since the Mac emulator I'm using is having trouble with it. It sounds ok to me, though a bit shrill at times. The later 256 color version is a straight port of the VGA talkie version, as far as I know. The FM Towns version is graphically very similar to the VGA talkie version, to the extent that they show the same scenes. I did notice some minor touch-up in one scene, but I don't know which is the original and which is the revised graphics. Scrolling is done pixel-by-pixel instead of eight pixels at a time. But as mentioned, it plays music pretty much non-stop without adding any new songs, which can get a bit annoying. It adds a few sound effects as well, e.g. a splash when Bobbin falling into the water. The notes you hear are often overlaid with sound effects too, making them even harder to make out. The TurboGrafx-16 version is a bit of an odd bird. Some of the graphics look like the EGA version with a bit less dithering, while others look like the VGA version with less colors. In one scene, a tree has been removed from the foreground. Perhaps having an object you could walk behind like that slowed down the graphics too much? Unlike the EGA version sound effect don't always interrupt the music. The music sounds pretty much the same as the first arrangement of each tune from the FM Towns version. However, some noticeable changes is that when the dragon carries you off it plays the same music as during the final confrontation, and in the caves afterwards it plays the Swan Lake theme. Also, the blacksmith music starts playing while you're still on the plateau outside the Forge. It's weird. When playing in an emulator (not ScummVM), the picture is a bit wider than 320 pixels. This causes glitches at the very end of the game, since some graphics are then visibly cropped. The VGA talkie version is... well, it was the first version I played, so I still have a soft spot for it. Most of the text has been modified in some way (usually made shorter, but sometimes longer). Maybe some of it sounded better when read aloud that way, but I don't know. All of the sound, speech and music was mixed together into one long audio track, which put an upper limit on how much they could fit. (I've seen one game that tried to get around this by putting half of the sound in the right channel and half in the left, but Loom did not use that trick.) Almost all of the ambient music is gone. Most of the distinctive close-up portraits are also gone, though a few new close-ups have been added. There is a bit more character animation as well. Some of it is good, while others is straight from the "Milking the Giant Cow" school of acting. Particularly the Elders and bishop Mandible. I don't have the remaining versions, but I understand that they're graphically like the EGA version. So the main difference is the audio. Since ScummVM can now replace the music, it should be fairly easy to make e.g. the EGA version sound like the Amiga version, if that's what you prefer. Though the sound effects will still be different. The palette may be slightly different, too?

With the development version of ScummVM, you can also replace the music in the EGA version. It's still subject to the limitations of the original music, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Loom#Audio_tracks

With the caveat that I've only played it in ScummVM, not on real hardware, I don't like how that version handles music. It has two versions of each piece of music. First it plays one, then it loops the other (usually inferior) one it's time to play the next piece of music. It gets a bit grating, and it makes it harder to make out the notes of the drafts you have to learn. There's also the TurboGrafx-16 version, which has graphics somewhere between the EGA and FM Towns version, but that one makes some inexplicable changes to the music as well. So all things considered, I still prefer the EGA version.

Recent versions of ScummVM write back the original value into the script, so that should fix the bugs introduced by the crack. But I have to admit that I've never actually played through all of Maniac Mansion. And as far as I know, GOG (and probably Steam) is using an older version of ScummVM.

Yes, the intention was probably to simply bypass the security door. (Which, as far as I can tell, LucasArts would instead do by ensuring that the door was open.) Unfortunately, the script for the security door keypad gets reused for other keypads in the game as well. Given how bad the crack is (if you just guess, you still have a one-in-ten chance of failure since you need to get the last digit wrong), I very much doubt LucasArts themselves made it. The earliest reference I could find to the crack was in a file titled "PC Games Cheats & info List", that was "Updated 5 February 1996 ver 2.1". That's long after the game was released, so I have no doubt the crack is much older than that. It was described simply as: Maniac Mansion iii) crack Removing doc check: File: 43.lfl 00000B79: FE FF If I compare the version I got from my old floppies, they're identical to the version embedded in the remastered Day of the Tentacle. The version I bought from GOG has this exact crack applied to 43.LFL. The 00.LFL file is also a bit different, but I don't know what that's all about. I haven't heard of it causing any harm. So what does this crack do? Sorry for getting a bit technical, but if I run the script through the ScummVM "descumm" tool, this is what part of the uncracked script looks like: [0066] (1A) Var[68] = 255; [006A] (80) breakHere(); [006B] (08) unless (Var[68] != 255) goto 006A; [0071] (88) if (Var[68] != Var[63]) { [0076] (1A) Var[67] = 1; [007A] (**) } [007A] (1A) Var[68] = 255; [007E] (80) breakHere(); [007F] (08) unless (Var[68] != 255) goto 007E; [0085] (88) if (Var[68] != Var[64]) { [008A] (1A) Var[67] = 1; [008E] (**) } [008E] (1A) Var[68] = 255; [0092] (80) breakHere(); [0093] (08) unless (Var[68] != 255) goto 0092; [0099] (88) if (Var[68] != Var[65]) { [009E] (1A) Var[67] = 1; [00A2] (**) } [00A2] (1A) Var[68] = 255; [00A6] (80) breakHere(); [00A7] (08) unless (Var[68] != 255) goto 00A6; [00AD] (88) if (Var[68] != Var[66]) { [00B2] (1A) Var[67] = 1; [00B6] (**) } I take this to mean that Var[68] is what you input. This is compared against Var[63], Var[64], Var[65] and Var[66], presumably the four correct digits. If you get any of them wrong, Var[67] is set to 1. In the cracked version, the last bit has been changed to: [00A2] (1A) Var[68] = 255; [00A6] (80) breakHere(); [00A7] (08) unless (Var[68] != 255) goto 00A6; [00AD] (88) if (Var[68] != Var[66]) { [00B2] (1A) Var[67] = 0; [00B6] (**) } I.e. Var[67] still gets set to 1 if you get any of the first three digits wrong, but if you get the last digit wrong it gets set to 0 instead of 1. But if you get any of the first three wrong, and then get the last one right, Var[67] remains 1.

To this, I would add that last time I checked the enhanced version of Maniac Mansion being sold on GOG (and Steam?) is cracked. (The original version is not.) In any (?) puzzle that involves a keypad (phone numbers, safe combinations, etc.) the game will accept any number as long as you either get it right, or you get the last digit is wrong. The culprit is a 1 byte change to 43.LFL. The oldest mention I ever found was in a list of game cracks and cheats dated February 1996, but surely it's been around a lot longer than that. I've tried alerting both GOG and Disney to this, but the replies have been less than helpful. Which is maddening, because they obviously still have the original files: They can be extracted from the remastered version of Day of the Tentacle. In the end, I changed ScummVM to detect and undo the crack. But damn it, I shouldn't have to!