Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

pixeldust.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#21

Post by BuckRogers »

Looks good, I had a C128 but played The Secret of Monkey Island around its release but didn't know there was an EGA version. It looks like the two were released apart by just a few months.

Definitely in this era the C64 hardware held up better for longer than expected. I didn't feel the x86 side caught up and surpassed the C64 as an entire package in both graphics and sound until the 486 era. A platform that was truly cursed on the gaming side for a long time due to its primary market focus being business use. And here I am using a 9850X3D with 5070 GPU, distant descendents of our old 286 hardware that I would play Monkey Island on.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#22

Post by canpan »

no-name-here wrote: post #10
jonny_eh wrote: post #7

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake. More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8 Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.

Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).

The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.

Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#24

Post by haspok »

no-name-here wrote: post #10
jonny_eh wrote: post #7

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake. More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8 Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.

This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.

In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#25

Post by Subdivide8452 »

the_af wrote: post #17
jonny_eh wrote: post #7

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake. More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

Wow, they really messed up Loom in the EGA to VGA conversion. The EGA graphics were a work of art, very moody. It's interesting how the VGA version manages to be way less nuanced, plus it destroys that beautiful "blue" look of the night scenes.

This sounds so snobby. VGA Loom was absolutely stunning. I can understand that you may appreciate EGA more, but "messed up" sounds hyperbolic imo.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#27

Post by haspok »

qmr wrote: post #9

Ambitious. I wonder how many floppies it will be.

The EGA version was 4 1.44MB disks for MS-DOS, IIRC. Let's say 5MB. That's about 30 disk sides or 15 disks in DD disks. Not that bad actually, and perhaps the C64 images are smaller or more compressible than the EGA ones... So this should be some kind of an upper limit.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#28

Post by nwellnhof »

classichasclass wrote: post #3
simonw wrote: post #2

Those backgrounds look so good . I wonder if they'll be able to do anything with the iconic music.

With a SID? No problem. I think the title track could be arranged very easily for three voices.

You can do amazing things with only a single SID channel. One of the most impressive examples is the in-game music of Hawkeye [1] which allows to use the remaining two channels for sound effects.

[1] https://youtu.be/es-rWnVSJ1c

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#29

Post by rob74 »

jonny_eh wrote: post #7

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake. More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. The Amiga supported 32 colors (without tricks like EHB and HAM) in 320x200/240 mode, so only twice as much as EGA, but they could be picked freely from a palette of 4096 colors, so IMHO it looked much better than the EGA version with its fixed 16 colors. But if you look at screenshots (https://scummbar.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#30

Post by vintermann »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #26

I was just wondering why this process is not automated. Why do these graphics require redrawing? Resolution difference from EGA?

The C64 palette is completely different from the EGA palette.

C64: https://lospec.com/palette-list/commodore64

Default EGA palette (which Afaik monkey island used): https://lospec.com/palette-list/color-graphics-adapter

You see that the C64 palette has a much more muted, pastel look and does not map one to one to the CGA/default EGA palette. C64 has a lot less vivid colors, but it also has much better luminosity ramps which can make dithering look a lot better.

In addition, the C64 has restrictions on the number of colors you can use in the same 8x8 block which I don't think EGA had.

It takes an artist to turn a CGA/EGA image into a C64 image.

Post reply on HN