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Curse of Monkey Island without ScummVM


Benny

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Some people have recently been trying to run Curse of Monkey Island natively rather than through ScummVM. I wrote programs to help with this years ago but haven't updated them since ScummVM became more capable.

Here for when I forget this in a week for posterity is a quick guide to getting CMI working in Windows 10:

 

  1. Install the game using my installer
  2. The game will work fine in windowed mode but will just crash in fullscreen so...
  3. Get DGVoodoo2
  4. In the zip extract the dlls in the \ms\x86\ folder to your CMI folder
  5. The game will then run fine in fullscreen. If you want to change the aspect ratio and scaling extract dgVoodooCpl.exe to the CMI folder and run it.

 

For those who don't want to go digging for their original cds, archive.org has ISO images for CMI.

 

Why is this necessary?

CMI has a 16 bit installer, so it wont work in 64 bit versions of Windows. Hence my installer.

CMI normally needs the cd's inserted to play - my installer and launcher fixes that.

In Windows 10 CMI refuses to work in fullscreen no matter what compatibility settings I try. DGVoodoo2 converts the old graphics API's to their modern equivalent and this lets CMI work fullscreen.

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I remember using your installers for both CMI and EMI about 10 years ago and they were great. Thank you for making them by the way! 🙂

 

I have since become a full-time Linux user and now I'm wondering if your installers would work under some Wine trickery, particularly EMI's. Although the Steam version works fine with the Proton compatibility layer, I'd be curious to experiment at some point.

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You put a lot of work in this! Thank you!

What exactly is the advantage of playing CMI natively? I heard there were some sound issues with ScummVM, but I never really noticed this when playing.

 

You probably don’t have a Mac launcher up your sleeve somewhere, do you? 😜

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Wow, good to know! I was wondering why CMI wouldn't work with your installers. It's also worth noting that dgVoodoo2 can also be used to upscale the character models in Escape from Monkey Island and add anti-aliasing. It makes the game look so much better. It does require Supersampling being turned on in your video card though, otherwise it'll have some weird lines and artefacts all over the screen.

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6 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

What exactly is the advantage of playing CMI natively? I heard there were some sound issues with ScummVM, but I never really noticed this when playing.

 

CMI's implementation of iMUSE doesn't seem to be fully functional in ScummVM. The best locations to conduct a comparison would be the Barbery Coast and the Goodsoup Hotel. The original interpreter transitions between the themes smoothly, while ScummVM abruptly jumps from one to the other.

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4 hours ago, Udvarnoky said:

 

CMI's implementation of iMUSE doesn't seem to be fully functional in ScummVM. The best locations to conduct a comparison would be the Barbery Coast and the Goodsoup Hotel. The original interpreter transitions between the themes smoothly, while ScummVM abruptly jumps from one to the other.

 

That's very interesting, I never noticed that before. Or maybe I wasn't paying attention.

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Okay, I got the latest dev build and sure enough, iMUSE sounds like it's working as it should in CMI. That makes me happy. There should be some sort of PSA for people who are buying CMI that they ought to get the latest ScummVM binary, because whatever build the game comes bundled with when purchased off GOG/Steam is probably falling short.

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  • Udvarnoky changed the title to Curse of Monkey Island without ScummVM
22 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

I have not checked myself but didn’t andywinxp fixed those recently? Or at least greatly improved.

https://mixnmojo.com/news/All-I-want-for-Christmas-is-CMI-with-iMUSE#comments

Unfortunately not 1:1... Yet :)

But I'd say that the current one is a pretty good approximation which is still missing a few accuracy quirks. An approximation which I couldn't bother to replicate on The Dig for now even though they share the same audio code because I hate that game :(

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How could you hate The Dig??? I love that game!

It’s actually on my ‘to replay’ list, so if you tell me where to look I can tell you what I hear. Mind you, I don’t know the first thing about code or programming.

(And it might take some time for me to get around to it.)

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Has anyone played around with virtual machines? As I understand it Dosbox-x can basically reproduce a simulated 90s-era Windows environment, meaning that as far as the game’s concerned it’s on ‘home turf’.

 

Whether or not it is that simple I don’t know, but it seems like it’d be the most reliable way of getting as authentic an experience as possible short of literally setting up an ancient computer.

 

Of course you’d lose any ‘special’ options like upscaling tricks, but that could be fine…

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