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Get down with Monkey Island 2’s speaker music; trip on its EGA mode 22 Jun, 2018 / 6 comments

It’s Friday, and seeing you’re reading this instead of doing anything worthwhile, what better time to jump on the nostalgia train? A few years back, our very own elTee made this little video, featuring LeChuck’s Revenge in EGA and internal speaker mode.

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Largo’s theme is particularly trippy . . .

elTee is in the middle of writing up a larger article on his adventures with the floppy version of Monkey Island 2, so stay tuned!

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6 Comments

  • Avatar
    elTee on 09 Jul, 2018, 18:45…

    elTee

    AdamNorwood

    IIRC the artwork for SOMI was originally made for the EGA version, and then they hired extra artists to later crank out the VGA 256-color version? Or am I dreaming that? Not sure if Monkey Island 2 went that route, but it looks like they just dithered down the VGA art?


    You're right on both counts I believe


    Although I just realised, you can make it play the VGA version of MI1 in EGA mode and that way, it dithers down the VGA (because the true EGA version is a different bunch of files altogether)
  • Avatar
    elTee on 09 Jul, 2018, 18:43…

    AdamNorwood

    IIRC the artwork for SOMI was originally made for the EGA version, and then they hired extra artists to later crank out the VGA 256-color version? Or am I dreaming that? Not sure if Monkey Island 2 went that route, but it looks like they just dithered down the VGA art?


    You're right on both counts I believe
  • Avatar
    AdamNorwood on 04 Jul, 2018, 01:35…
    The SOMI EGA version was running in the EGA 640x200x16color mode, which is indeed higher resolution than VGA…at the expense that you only get 16 colors at a time (out of a full palette of 64 colors). The extra pixels helped with color dithering, at least. I'm not sure what MI2 was doing for its EGA version, but I'd suspect it'd be the same!

    IIRC the artwork for SOMI was originally made for the EGA version, and then they hired extra artists to later crank out the VGA 256-color version? Or am I dreaming that? Not sure if Monkey Island 2 went that route, but it looks like they just dithered down the VGA art?

    I can't believe I've de-lurked after 20-ish years reading this site just to talk about old graphics adapter modes…
  • Avatar
    elTee on 28 Jun, 2018, 18:06…

    Laserschwert

    Is that really EGA though? To me it looks like horizontal resolution is now 640 pixels, so that one VGA pixel could become two pixels side by side to allow for dithering. Was EGA really higher res than VGA?


    It's some emulated EGA mode, I think. The artwork is definitely the same file as the VGA art, it just displays it differently
  • Avatar
    Laserschwert on 28 Jun, 2018, 13:56…
    Is that really EGA though? To me it looks like horizontal resolution is now 640 pixels, so that one VGA pixel could become two pixels side by side to allow for dithering. Was EGA really higher res than VGA?
  • Avatar
    Scummbuddy on 25 Jun, 2018, 04:33…
    At first site oft the headline I didn't see what was to so special about this video and article. Then it hit me that I don't think I have ever seen MI2 as EGA, and I suppose never heard the music or sfx by PC Speaker... and I love it.

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