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

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#41

Post by rob74 »

vintermann wrote: post #30
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 ramp…

I think the C64 palette you linked has been "tweaked" by the artist who uploaded it, this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color

But your point is still valid: while IBM PCs and other machines of the time had a propensity for "pure" colors (cyan, magenta etc. - so 100% for one or two of the basic colors and 0 for the others), the C64 designers opted for more muted colors.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#42

Post by hansjorg »

weinzierl wrote: post #40

The good old Commodore did not have nearly enough memory to store all these beautiful images as screen sized bitmaps. Most of the games used text mode with a custom character set. 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…

There was no native text mode on the Amiga at least.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#43

Post by joachimma »

classichasclass wrote: post #8
p0w3n3d wrote: post #5

I wonder how do they want to overcome the memory limit? Or will it be using cartridge extensively?

Modern flash carts like EasyFlash and clones allow for absolutely cavernous cartridge images. As good examples, see the C64 ports of Prince of Persia and Eye of the Beholder, which run entirely from massive cartridge ROMs.

Eye of the Beholder is about 1MB, for comparison Terminator 2 on cartridge from back in the day was 512kB.

But the cartridges themselves contains gigabytes as you say.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#44

Post by flohofwoe »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #26

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

Hand drawn pixel graphics heavily relied on the hardware's color palette (and monitor properties) for dithering and 'lighting' tricks, and especially the C64 color palette is quite 'exotic' and didn't have overlap with other home computers of the time. You need to consider that essentially each pixel was carefully placed by hand to 'enhance' the limitations of the builtin palette through color bleeding with the neighoring pixels on CRT monitors.

Automatic conversion of images between different hardware platforms usually stood out as looking quite poor and a sign of a 'sloppy port'.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#45

Post by rustyhancock »

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.

The visuals are clearly better but honestly what worked best for me was the Floppy Audio.

Even the internal speakers actually made the intro theme great.

The CD was nicer to listen to overall but I do think the floppy audio just has something about it that I prefer.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#46

Post by vidarh »

rob74 wrote: post #29
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-isl…

For a game like that, while I agree with the Amiga version looks good, frankly the Amiga port still feels like a good example of why there were lots of complaints about "lazy" ports for the Amiga that didn't take proper advantage of what it could do.

For a relatively static display like that EHB would've not been a problem, and the amount of gradual changes would've made it easy to exploit in the palette. Using the copper to modify the palette a few places would've also allowed for more, and switching to 640x200 below the graphics to make the text smoother would've been outright trivial. Even HAM might've been reasonably feasible.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#47

Post by yason »

rob74 wrote: post #29
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-isl…

I was going to say this. I never liked the 256-color VGA game (and now comparing, it does look bland) but Amiga struck the best, IMHO, balance between good hand-crafted pixel art but with realistic enough colors to give sufficient depth and athmosphere in the scene.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#48

Post by vidarh »

rob74 wrote: post #38
xecaz wrote: post #36

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.

Good question! Since the game is mostly scene-based, it should be possible to play it scene by scene with lots of reading from disk. However the original game also had some larger scenes that used quite a lot of horizontal scrolling (some backgrounds for those scenes can be seen under "A collection of backgrounds from the game" in the article), not so sure about those... Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many…

The large scenes looks like about 4 screens wide? But they're not full height - looks like about 2/3, so let's say ~24KB total including color data. I don't think it should be a problem. The walk + scroll is slow enough that if you had to (and I don't think you do) you ought to be able to time things so you can load the next screen while the player is walking.

Similarly, e.g. slow down the door animation, and a fade, and you ought to have enough time for a decent fast loader to load the next screen (~2-3 seconds assuming you're loading 2/3 of the screen)

You really benefit from the low amount of action on screen here.

If you want to actually compress the data to reduce the number of floppies, you'd slow it down quite a bit. If you were doing it for a real C64 or cartridges constrained to what was viable at the time, that might well be preferable to more floppies. If you're doing it for a modern cartridge or an emulator, it won't matter.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#49

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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

Amiga versions seem the best of all the Lucasarts adventures, music is just much richer and although Monkey Island and Loom are done in the reduced color palette so look more stylistic I think they use a few more colors or better shades of colors than the harsh looking EGA set.

Re: Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

#50

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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.

It's bad, but what they did to Loom was way way worse, they obliterated the style, chiaroscuro and nuance.
Post reply on HN