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There had already been an attempt in 2023 https://www.lemon64.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion
D42 is a system for making text adventures, not graphics adventures, so I wouldn't be surprised if the conversion ended up sub par.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia. Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly…
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.
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 trul…
I am assuming this will demand REU or an ultimate 64 to run it? Hard to believe they would be able to package this and make the game fluent without more ram.
Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.
I didn't care much about the actual main story, Ron Gilbert was never serious about the story anyway (and he coldly murdered it in the long-awaited "official" sequel, Return)
But I loved how each island was like a unique mini world onto itself, and as a kid it really struck me how it was always night on some islands and always day on others (which I later liked to headcanon as being set on a tidally-locked planet :)
Chapter 2 of LeChuck's Revenge is one of my best memories in gaming. Why haven't any modern games tried to recapture that piratey seabreeze freedom of exploring many different islands?
Maybe they could pull a Thimbleweed Park and do a "spiritual successor" in all but name, like it did with Maniac Mansion, and call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
I always wondered how this worked on the Amiga and PC ports of the classic games. Did they just copy the approach and use text mode as well or did they use proper bitmap images as backgrounds? Same question for games that were native to the 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?