ScummVM games whose FM Towns port > the PC port

[RetroADV316]

I was wondering if I could get a listing of games where its better to play the FM Towns Marty port in ScummVM rather than the PC port.

I have heard (and personally discovered) that the FM Towns Marty port of Loom is superior to the PC CD-ROM port of Loom. Although the PC port has 'talkie' voice acting, the dialog and in-game text has been abridged, and this port features the most censorship. The FM Towns Marty port lacks 'talkie' voice acting, but the text and dialog is not abridged, and the censorship is minimal. Even the game's developers consider this to be the best port of the game.

The FM Towns port of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has better quality music compared to the PC port.

Are there any other examples where the non-PC port was outshined by the FM Towns port? Also, besides certain FM Towns Marty titles, are there any non-PC ports of ScummVM-compatible games that are superior to their PC ports?

[eriktorbjorn]

I have heard (and personally discovered) that the FM Towns Marty port of Loom is superior to the PC CD-ROM port of Loom. Although the PC port has 'talkie' voice acting, the dialog and in-game text has been abridged, and this port features the most censorship. The FM Towns Marty port lacks 'talkie' voice acting, but the text and dialog is not abridged, and the censorship is minimal. Even the game's developers consider this to be the best port of the game.

I don't know about the other developers of the game, but Brian Moriarty has said at least a couple of times that he considers the EGA version to be the best version of the game. There's the GDC talk he gave, and there's short interview where they ask him what a remastered version would look and sound like. Probably other interviews, as well.

I can see his point, though some of the 256-colour graphics look pretty nice to me. I was lucky enough to find the FM Towns version on eBay without having to pay an arm and a leg for it (probably because it didn't include the original box), and it's at least interesting. I do think it's a slightly harder version to play, though. Unlike most other versions, the music doesn't stop while other sounds are playing, and it sometimes uses sound effects instead of notes when you hear a draft. So they can be a bit hard to make out.

I don't even mind the PC CD-ROM version (which was the first version of Loom I ever played). I just wish it hadn't completely supplanted all other versions. It almost makes you wonder if George Lucas was personally involved somehow... (Well, not really.) I don't have much hope of ever seeing any other version for sale. Disney has been looking into it for the past six-and-a-half years now. And yet their Loom support page recommends you install the Roland Upgrade, for some reason. It's almost as if they don't know what they're selling.

Oh, and their version of Maniac Mansion on GOG and Steam is clumsily cracked. (End rant.)

The FM Towns port of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has better quality music compared to the PC port.

I don't have that version, though it seems to me that you could get a similar experience from turning down the volume and listening to the movie soundtrack on the side.

Are there any other examples where the non-PC port was outshined by the FM Towns port? Also, besides certain FM Towns Marty titles, are there any non-PC ports of ScummVM-compatible games that are superior to their PC ports?

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders? It's one of those games I still haven't played, but I was happy to see that GOG (and Steam?) include both the 16-colour DOS version (not the original even-lower-resolution one, though) and the 256-colour FM Towns version. Not sure how that happened, given the Loom situation, but I bought it in an instant.

[RetroADV316]

The FM Towns port of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has better quality music compared to the PC port.

I don't have that version, though it seems to me that you could get a similar experience from turning down the volume and listening to the movie soundtrack on the side.

The difference is sound quality is marginal. I don't notice a huge difference between the VGA version of the game for PCs and the FM Towns Marty port.

Loom is what really motivated me to start this thread, since a lot of dialog was abridged for the CD-ROM re-release of Loom for the PC. I wonder if there are other non-PC versions of ScummVM games that pack a lot more content than the versions a lot of people would automatically seek out.

[eriktorbjorn]

Loom is what really motivated me to start this thread, since a lot of dialog was abridged for the CD-ROM re-release of Loom for the PC. I wonder if there are other non-PC versions of ScummVM games that pack a lot more content than the versions a lot of people would automatically seek out.

Apparently the NES version of Maniac Mansion has non-stop (?) music, with different themes for each character. I've seen people in forums say the game feels odd without that, but I only know it from YouTube. If the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate and Deja Vu II) ever become supported, we'll probably hear the same comparisons to the NES versions there. I've played a little bit of the remakes on Steam but compared to the Macintosh versions I played back in the eighties those versions just feel so... wrong.

The 3DO version of The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel is a "talkie" game that replaces the hard-drawn portraits with filmed actors. That version isn't supported by ScummVM though. (It's not completely broken, but...)

The 16-colour Mac versions of Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade use a high-resolution font, but I don't know if that's enough to call them better than the PC versions. (This works with the development version of ScummVM, though the user interface for Last Crusade is nothing like the original. Maybe some day...)

And of course, there are those who will swear that the Amiga versions always have better music than anything else in the entire universe, even in cases where they're clearly wrong.

[RetroADV316]

Apparently the NES version of Maniac Mansion has non-stop (?) music, with different themes for each character. I've seen people in forums say the game feels odd without that, but I only know it from YouTube. If the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate and Deja Vu II) ever become supported, we'll probably hear the same comparisons to the NES versions there. I've played a little bit of the remakes on Steam but compared to the Macintosh versions I played back in the eighties those versions just feel so... wrong.

Thank you for mentioning Maniac Mansion. I was aware of the fact that the NES port has non-stop music, but read that it spoils the mood of the game and makes the sound effects less noticeable. If that is how a person feels about the game, it goes without saying that the PC port is superior.

The NES port of Maniac Mansion is also infamous for censorship - something that also affected the MacVenture games you mentioned. However, when it comes to the MacVenture games, I ADORE the music from the NES ports, and can't get into the computer ports so easily because they lack music altogether.

[Jorpho]

If the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate and Deja Vu II) ever become supported, we'll probably hear the same comparisons to the NES versions there. I've played a little bit of the remakes on Steam but compared to the Macintosh versions I played back in the eighties those versions just feel so... wrong.

Are you aware that you can technically get the Macintosh versions?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3438 ... re_Series/

These run off an open-source Javascript re-implementation of the original engine. (With a little bit of effort it ought to be possible to extract the disk images from the game data and run them on a Macintosh emulator, if you wanted to.)

[eriktorbjorn]

Are you aware that you can technically get the Macintosh versions?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3438 ... re_Series/

These run off an open-source Javascript re-implementation of the original engine. (With a little bit of effort it ought to be possible to extract the disk images from the game data and run them on a Macintosh emulator, if you wanted to.)

Yes, the WebVenture engine. I believe that's the one the in-progress engine in ScummVM is based on. Either that or the specification he made. I've only figured out how to extract the disk images from the Macintosh .dmg files though, and I only know how to do this under Linux. For reference, this was the commands I used to extract Deja Vu just now:

Code: Select all

dmg2img dejavu_macventure.dmg
udisksctl loop-setup -f dejavu_macventure.dmg
udisksctl mount -b /dev/loop0
cp "/media/$USER/Deja Vu - MacVenture Series/Deja Vu.app/Contents/Resources/public/Deja Vu.dsk" .
cp "/media/$USER/Deja Vu - MacVenture Series/Deja Vu.app/Contents/Resources/public/Deja Vu.2mg" .
udisksctl unmount -b /dev/loop0
udisksctl loop-delete -b /dev/loop0

In the past I've used "mount -t hfsplus -o loop dejavu_macventure.img /mnt" instead of udisksctl, but that requires root access. The udisksctl stuff was something I found just now, so I may be using it wrong here.

The versions being sold now are a bit different from the ones I played back in the day. Apparently they were updated (to work with newer versions of Mac OS?), and some sounds were changed. But it's still neat that they're being sold at all.