The rarest version of Monkey Island

[M'ilon]

As you are going to see, it was part of a compilation. The manual says that Monkey Island should include Eight 2.25" disks or four 3.5" disks, One User's Manual, One Dial-A-Pirate Wheel and One Upgrade Certificate. And it did contain all of these things, except the disks. Instead of 4 disks - there were 7DD disks.

 

You may remember me claiming so a couple of years ago, now here is the proof:

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v80/Meksilon/orig_book_cover.jpg

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v80/Meksilon/orig_book_m_cover.jpg

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v80/Meksilon/orig_book_p38.jpg

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v80/Meksilon/orig_dial_a_pirate.jpg

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v80/Meksilon/orig_disks.jpg

These are the only 3 surviving disks I know of. The rest of the disks I have from the compilation are 1 Duck Tales Disk, 3 Rocketeer Disks (but I'm missing the code wheel), And 4 Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe disks (I'm missing the manual and code wheel - these disks never worked).

 

So, in other words I have every disk of the compilation minus 4 of the Secret of Monkey Island disks. All the disks are double density except the 3 rocketeer disks which are high density. Atari (the company that trades under the name Sega Ozisoft) do not have copies of any of these games on file.

 

The search continues, do you have or know anyone who has a copy of Monkey Island for the PC on 7DD disks? This was not one of the other versions crammed onto 7DD disks, I know this because I played the game directly from the disks. The 286 did not have the hard disk space for a permanent install. When we upgraded to a 486, the upgrade certificate was used to get a CD-ROM version of the game - for a year or so the game had become unplayable due to the disks failing. Two of the 3 surviving disks you can see had labels pasted over the original ones - because they were recycled for use as blank disks. I have simply removed those over-labels.

 

This version is different. It is unique. I know (thus far) of no other distributor that sold the 7DD disk version of The Secret of Monkey Island. But it seems unlikely it was exclusive to Atari since 1. They had access to HD disks and 2. The game had to be specifically compiled by the Scumm resource-file compiler to span 7DD 3.5" disks. For now it looks like this version has been lost forever, however it was produced by LucasArts and it was distributed by Atari in Australia.

 

=Mek=

[Benny]

In terms of the compilation it might be unique but in terms of the resource files it'll just be the standard ega version of mi: 5 x lfl files and 8x disk.lec files, these will easily fit onto 7 x dd floppies (720k each). It's unlikely to have been compiled seperately, the interpreter might be different though.

[M'ilon]

Wrong, the EGA version fits onto 4DD disks, it was the VGA version on 7DD disks. You only need to fit about 630kb (+20odd kb in .lfl files) onto each disk... whereas for 4HD disks you need to fit about 1150kb/disk.

 

By the way if you have the 8 5.25" disk vga version can you send me the resource files?

 

Daniel

[elTee]

Interesting. The way things are going, I wouldn't be suprised if someone showed up with a Megadrive Port of Loom.

[Joshi]

You mean you don't have one?!