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I have used SCUMMVM a lot over the years. It's brilliant that it exists. However I have never liked that it doesn't quite offer an accurate depiction of games since it replaces original game menus with its own. Also the graphical options are pretty limited and the ones that are there aren't great. So in recent years I have been running the old SCUMM games via DOSBox. They take a little more setting up, but the end result is easily worth it. The problem is that The Curse of Monkey Island is a 16-bit Windows game, not MS-DOS. Which means that on a modern 64-bit machine I'm kinda forced to use SCUMMVM as far as I know. This is fine, but it has made me think that these old games shouldn't be reliant on one method of running them. Is there any way of running COMI without using SCUMMVM and without going to the trouble of running a virtual machine (which I believe is pretty useless for gaming anyway)? With some Windows games we're lucky enough to get patched EXEs or remastered versions (though of course we don't get the proper original experience with the latter).

I have been experimenting around with the "Curse of Monkey Island" installation (English CD version) and ScummVM and found some interesting stuff considering internationalization. The main differences of the international releases of "Curse of Monkey Island" compared to the English one are: - The version selection screen is different. The regular English version has an entirely graphic screen (wooden sign) with the texts painted into the graphic. The international versions show a "clean" wooden sign with the texts shown in the game font (see pictures below). - There are additional text strings (translations for the chapter names). - The pirate song "A Pirate I Was Meant To Be" is skipped. (Apparently, it was considered too hard to translate) The text strings for the game are located in the file Language.tab, which is rather straightforward. I was experimenting by replacing the Language.tab with different language files. For the convenience, for this demonstration I used the included English Language.tab: Left: English version, Right: International Version with English Language.tab - If you set the game language to English in ScummVM, the Language.tab is not used at all. The strings are all in English, even if the Language.tab is a translated one. - If you set the game language to either German, French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese (haven't tried others), the International version will kick in. That is, you get the different font on the version selection screen, the extra chapter subtitles AND you won't get the Pirate song. Left: English version, Right: International Version with English Language.tab - If you set the game language to some more exotic language, like Chinese or Russian, you will have the following: Language.tab will be used, but there won't be any subtitles for chapter names and the game selection screen will be original English one. This seems to be the preferrable feature for any unauthorized fan translations like this one: I used to think that the language specified in ScummVM is but a supplementary feature with no real function - it looks however like it isn't. Also, it looks like the same game binaries handle both the US and the international version and contained all the necessary resources (except for the translations themselves). However, I also have a question: Is there a possibility to get both the localized scene selection screen (like in int'l version), the extra subtitles for chapter names (like in the int'l version), but with the Pirate Song intact?