Could Curse of Monkey Island be remastered for DS play?

shuuki · Post by **shuuki** » Sat Sep 22, 2007 4:41 pm

I'm new to this world of ScummVM on the DS. I've been collating data and acquiring all the things I need to get my DS running all the random retro goodness I want. However, what would really interest me is a version of Curse of Monkey Island playable on the DS. On reading the ScummVM DS guide, I see that it's officially unsupported due to the fact that there is "simply is not enough RAM on the DS to run these games." The official CoMI requirements are listed as "Pentium 90 or greater, 16 MB RAM." Ok, I see the problem here. 4MB vs 16MB. Rather a bit of a discrepancy. It seems like the argument ends there... but does it?

This gets wondering. CoMI wants 4x more RAM than the DS can give. At the same time, CoMI was running at 640x480 resolution. The DS can only support 256x192. Unless my math is wrong, the game as it exists normally is rendering an image that is 625% of the available screen size of the DS. Forgive me if this is an utterly noob question, but why wouldn't it be possible to remaster the CoMI resources to optimize them for DS play? Downmix the audio, resize the graphics and cutscenes, and maybe redo some of the more functional graphics like the inventory screen and cursor for maximum visibility. A guide for compression on the PSP was put forward a couple years back at http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?p=21199. That is really only useful insofar as audio compression and space optimization goes, but wouldn't remastering the game resources also mean they could load faster and require less memory?

I know I'm talking about digging deep into the game resources and touching thousands of files, but for the privilege of carrying CoMI around in my pocket I think it might be worth it... if it's at all feasible.

Any thoughts? Would this be worth the time to attempt, or should I just be happy with MI 1/2 and go on with my life?

clem · Post by **clem** » Sat Sep 22, 2007 5:09 pm

you're correct that's lot of (manual) work, more than anyone will ever undertake

also, the RAM requirements probably not only stem from the resolution - think of huge scrolling areas, game logic and so on

it'd probably be easier to re-write the game from scratch - and by the time you're finished you can play it probably on your next gen DS-successor

and then there's the legal aspect: such a modified version could not be made available for download, so each user would have to do that for themselves

shuuki · Post by **shuuki** » Sat Sep 22, 2007 8:53 pm

Curse you for saying what I knew you were going to say! :p

I was hoping against hope it might be easier than I expected. Ahh well. Thanks.

Hachi · Post by **Hachi** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 9:12 pm

hi, im new to this forum, and i absolutely love scummVM, i actually just got a DSL and was investigating wut sorts of cool stuff i could do with it, then i found this! its absolutely amazing, ive played these adventure games when i was like a kid and my favorite ones are Sam n Max, Full Throttle, The Dig, and MI series.

ANYWAYS, well excuse me for being totally noobish, but wouldn't it be possible to create a tool to automate the whole 'conversion' or 'remastering' process for users that have their own game content, and therefore offering such a tool should not raise any legal issues? if its at all possible. about the game logic and other concerns for hardware capability, i mean if DS can run something like Metroid Prime Hunters, and Zelda Phantom's Hourglass i'm pretty sure thats plenty more than wut even CoMI needs? so it seems feasible to me, but correct me if im wrong.

clem · Post by **clem** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 10:07 pm

Hachi wrote:ANYWAYS, well excuse me for being totally noobish, but wouldn't it be possible to create a tool to automate the whole 'conversion' or 'remastering' process for users that have their own game content, and therefore offering such a tool should not raise any legal issues?

true. so only the other 3 points outlined above still apply

(also such a tool would have to be hand-crafted, even more work)

Hachi · Post by **Hachi** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 6:04 pm

clem wrote:
Hachi wrote:ANYWAYS, well excuse me for being totally noobish, but wouldn't it be possible to create a tool to automate the whole 'conversion' or 'remastering' process for users that have their own game content, and therefore offering such a tool should not raise any legal issues?
true. so only the other 3 points outlined above still apply
(also such a tool would have to be hand-crafted, even more work)

even after it gets remastered? and actually, with things like scumm revisited and scumm tools, it might be very possible, not to mention adding archived support which is totally doable

clem · Post by **clem** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 6:23 pm

Hachi wrote:even after it gets remastered? and actually, with things like scumm revisited and scumm tools, it might be very possible, not to mention adding archived support which is totally doable

cool with me, thanks for volunteering!
just tell us when you're finished

katiesam77 · Post by **katiesam77** » Fri May 15, 2009 11:19 pm

I'm another noob who's only just discovered scummvm and this is probably a very simplistic way to look at it but if Curse of Monkey Island needs 16mb ram, would it be possible to use one of the new 16mb misco sdhc cards to make it work?

Hansi · Post by **Hansi** » Fri May 15, 2009 11:36 pm

katiesam77 wrote:I'm another noob who's only just discovered scummvm and this is probably a very simplistic way to look at it but if Curse of Monkey Island needs 16mb ram, would it be possible to use one of the new 16mb misco sdhc cards to make it work?

I hope that was a joke...

Red_Breast · Post by **Red_Breast** » Sat May 16, 2009 2:09 pm

Just to explain katiesam I think you mean 16GB SDHC cards. Notice the difference. And no 16GB doesn't mean CoMI's 16MB will fit onto a 16GB card easy.
If you still don't understand you need to read about different memory types and what they're used for, such as volatile RAM memory and the non-volatile type used in SDHC cards.

Flo · Post by **Flo** » Fri Jun 05, 2009 8:36 pm

The best point of hope right now seems to be the DSi. If anyone can get homebrew to run in native DSi mode rather than compatibility mode, the extra CPU speed (133 MHz vs. 66 MHz) and RAM (16MB vs. 4MB) might be enough to get the newer SCUMM games to run.

MusicallyInspired · Post by **MusicallyInspired** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 1:11 am

Not to mention the larger screens. Are they actually larger pixel-wise? Or is it just scaled up?

Flo · Post by **Flo** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 12:44 pm

The DSi screens are the same resolution as the DS/DS Lite's (256x192), they're just larger by a quarter of an inch.

MusicallyInspired · Post by **MusicallyInspired** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 1:57 pm

Well that's stupid. Why does Nintendo suck with good ideas?

ajaxv1 · Post by **ajaxv1** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 6:19 am

i know that resolution of the game is also a problem
but just a thought
how about you put in an option to change the "zoomed view" and split the screen into 2 halfs
top and bottom
and if you need to press anything on top screen
just switch, like you do with zoomed view