Loom & Indy3 PC EGA, What's the difference between versions A, B & C?

[GalvatronJB]

Is there a difference between Versions, A, B & C of both Loom & The Last Crusade (the graphic adventure)? They're all PC, EGA & English, and the versions appear to be independent of whether they're sourced from a 5.25 or 3.5" discs. Can anyone shed any light on this?

[Tsomi]

As far as I can say, they're later versions with some script and interpreter fixes/improvements.

If you press Ctrl-V during gameplay, you'll often see a different build number and release date (it doesn't work in all titles, though).

[GalvatronJB]

Is there a definitive list of all the different released versions somewhere?

[Tsomi]

Not that I'm aware of, which is quite surprising…

This detection list inside ScummVM shows that Indy3, Loom and Monkey1 indeed had several revisions:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob ... d5.txt#L52

but I don't think that anyone's ever documented their differences (that's somewhere on my todo-list, but it really needs a collaborative effort). The Macintosh releases often fixed some typos and grammar errors in the original English games, by the way.

I also believe that Aaron Giles (who now works on his DREAMM project) is trying to document these different versions.

[LogicDeLuxe]

AfaIk, they mainly differ in the index file. There is a table telling the game which room is on which disk. Thus, releases with different numbers of disks have different index files. Games up do Monkey 1 used to be played directly from the floppies without an installation or the need for a hard drive. Even SCUMM V5 still supported that, but they only made use of it on the Amiga versions.

[Tsomi]

Going back to this interesting topic again, here are some bugfixes which appear in some of the later builds of the same main release, as far as I know.

• Loom: the first time you meet the shepherds in the EGA release, one of them may be removed too early from the scene, although he's still on the screen and may speak if you use the stealth draft on him. Later builds of the EGA release fixed this.
• Monkey Island 1: the English VGA floppy release (as appears in the LRG Anthology) fixes the Jolly Roger continuity error in Part 2, but my French VGA floppy release doesn't. (The Amiga version is also said to have 2 releases with different palettes but maybe it was just a runtime setting depending on your Amiga hardware?).
• Monkey Island 2: the earliest releases would crash if you pulled the rope when it was already in your inventory, on Dinky Island. Later releases fixed this or disabled this action. I also have some vague memory of the Italian release changing some scripts a bit (in LeChuck's fortress and in the verb script, I believe), but I'd need to have a look at this again.
• Indy 4: the Macintosh releases appear to fix or work around some original errors, such as the corrupted voice sample when being caught by the guards in the submarine.
• Sam & Max Hit the Road: there are some buggy actions at the Savage Jungle Inn, but only in the non-English releases (e.g. wrong actor being used when talking to Evelyn Morrison while wearing the bigfoot costume, or Conroy Bumpus' taser being invisible in the German release). My guess is that these bugs have been found and fixed in time for the English release, but weren't backported to the translated releases.

Some duplicated script and costumes have also been removed from the later Loom and Monkey1 builds. Sometimes, the credits also change a bit (forgotten names, typos…). And then some later releases had some newer interpreter versions, or removed the original copy protection.

So yeah, if someone collects different builds… extracting, descumm'ing and diff'ing the resources would definitely show some interesting things here and there.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Monkey Island 1: the English VGA floppy release (as appears in the LRG Anthology) fixes the Jolly Roger continuity error in Part 2, but my French VGA floppy release doesn't.

That's interesting. I've never seen it officially fixed. The continuity error is still present in the enhanced CD, which I fixed for the Ultimate Talkie Edition.

(The Amiga version is also said to have 2 releases with different palettes but maybe it was just a runtime setting depending on your Amiga hardware?).

They exists. I've seen both versions. One uses a CGA (EGA default) palette for the actors, the other uses the palette known from Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, which had some colors in a brighter shade on Amiga. The latter doesn't work that well in all those dark scenes, imho.
Seems hardcoded, as I don't seen any option to change that.

Monkey Island 2: the earliest releases would crash if you pulled the rope when it was already in your inventory, on Dinky Island. Later releases fixed this or disabled this action. I also have some vague memory of the Italian release changing some scripts a bit (in LeChuck's fortress and in the verb script, I believe), but I'd need to have a look at this again.

That's interesting too. I only ever have seen this fixed in the German version. The translator had access to the full scripts to adapt when necessary. But other than this fix, the positions of the verbs and of course the text, I didn't find any further difference.
In Monkey 1, he used the opportunity to add an extra credits page for the translation team, though.

Sam & Max Hit the Road: there are some buggy actions at the Savage Jungle Inn, but only in the non-English releases (e.g. wrong actor being used when talking to Evelyn Morrison while wearing the bigfoot costume, or Conroy Bumpus' taser being invisible in the German release). My guess is that these bugs have been found and fixed in time for the English release, but weren't backported to the translated releases.

I didn't notice any script bugs in the German version. There is however one badly cut line, ie. you hear some unintelligible talk before the actual line begins. That was late game in the room with the columns.

Some duplicated script and costumes have also been removed from the later Loom and Monkey1 builds. Sometimes, the credits also change a bit (forgotten names, typos…). And then some later releases had some newer interpreter versions, or removed the original copy protection.

The code wheel protection was never actually removed, though. It was either skipped by a hacked executable, or by the script itself. It is still present in the enhanced CD, and I made it accessible with a boot parameter in the Ultimate Talkie Edition.

In Monkey Island 2, though, the Amiga Kixx release actually did remove it completely by replacing it with a whole lot of NOP instructions. That altered script was very helpful for me to get the Ultimate Talkie Edition working, since it has the difficulty selection intact, which the executable hacked CD version didn't.

[Tsomi]

Monkey Island 1: the English VGA floppy release (as appears in the LRG Anthology) fixes the Jolly Roger continuity error in Part 2, but my French VGA floppy release doesn't.

That's interesting. I've never seen it officially fixed. The continuity error is still present in the enhanced CD, which I fixed for the Ultimate Talkie Edition.

Yeah, the VGA floppy release that's on the LRG set has an `if (isScriptRunning(119))` check in the entry script of room 87, so that the Jolly Roger only appears the first time this room is displayed:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/4178

But then it was lost again in the translated VGA floppy releases, and in the official v5 releases. Fortunately you fixed it too!

(The Amiga version is also said to have 2 releases with different palettes but maybe it was just a runtime setting depending on your Amiga hardware?).

They exists. I've seen both versions. One uses a CGA (EGA default) palette for the actors, the other uses the palette known from Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, which had some colors in a brighter shade on Amiga. The latter doesn't work that well in all those dark scenes, imho.
Seems hardcoded, as I don't seen any option to change that.

Oh, thanks for this confirmation. I see there was an old forum thread and a couple of bugs reports about this; this one is still alive and there's still some interest in understanding what was going on: https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/7455. It looks like playing the EGA/Amiga Render Mode option in ScummVM already lets you switch between the two rendering modes (i.e. pale Guybrush or sunburnt Guybrush) but I don't know if it's OK or if we're still missing something.

Monkey Island 2: the earliest releases would crash if you pulled the rope when it was already in your inventory, on Dinky Island. Later releases fixed this or disabled this action. I also have some vague memory of the Italian release changing some scripts a bit (in LeChuck's fortress and in the verb script, I believe), but I'd need to have a look at this again.

That's interesting too. I only ever have seen this fixed in the German version. The translator had access to the full scripts to adapt when necessary. But other than this fix, the positions of the verbs and of course the text, I didn't find any further difference.

In Monkey 1, he used the opportunity to add an extra credits page for the translation team, though.

Yeah, I wonder if all the translation teams had access to the full scripts with permission to adapt them, or just the raw text without much context. I guess it probably varied. The French translations of Zak and Monkey2 are very bad for example: the puns, rhymes, and the alphabetical index in Phatt Island Library were all killed by gruesome literal translation, as if the person who did the translation didn't even have access to the game. They switched to some other translation team with much better results for the French localisation of Indy4, fortunately.

As for the Italian version of Monkey 2, I have a note here saying that the puzzle where LeChuck captures you in his fortress becomes a bit easier, i.e. you don't need to drink the green beverage as often as in the original version. But that's something I'd need to explore again, as it's a very small note I've written some years ago.

I know that the Japanese version of Indy4 also added some subtitles under the city names on the maps.

Sam & Max Hit the Road: there are some buggy actions at the Savage Jungle Inn, but only in the non-English releases (e.g. wrong actor being used when talking to Evelyn Morrison while wearing the bigfoot costume, or Conroy Bumpus' taser being invisible in the German release). My guess is that these bugs have been found and fixed in time for the English release, but weren't backported to the translated releases.

I didn't notice any script bugs in the German version. There is however one badly cut line, ie. you hear some unintelligible talk before the actual line begins. That was late game in the room with the columns.

Ah yes, there are some badly cut lines in the French and German resources. Unfortunately, they're already badly cut in the original audio resource files.

As for the scripting bugs, we work around them in ScummVM: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... t_the_Road. If you uncheck the "Enable in-game enhancements" option in an up-to-date version, you should see most of the original bugs again (but some of them are still hardcoded at the moment; I'm working on reviewing them all).

Some duplicated script and costumes have also been removed from the later Loom and Monkey1 builds. Sometimes, the credits also change a bit (forgotten names, typos…). And then some later releases had some newer interpreter versions, or removed the original copy protection.

The code wheel protection was never actually removed, though. It was either skipped by a hacked executable, or by the script itself. It is still present in the enhanced CD, and I made it accessible with a boot parameter in the Ultimate Talkie Edition.

In Monkey Island 2, though, the Amiga Kixx release actually did remove it completely by replacing it with a whole lot of NOP instructions. That altered script was very helpful for me to get the Ultimate Talkie Edition working, since it has the difficulty selection intact, which the executable hacked CD version didn't.

Indeed, I should have said "disabled", not "removed"!

Anyway, that's an opportunity for me to thank you again for your incredible work on the Ultimate Talkie editions. I don't know if you are aware of this, but we've found and fixed a couple of new bugs in them (including a dead-end in Monkey 2):

• https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/commit/c447a9ccbd62
• https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/4011
• https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/4132

(and I also need to add a small fix for some missing audio from the spectators during the spitting contest; script 47-218.)

I don't know if you plan on publishing new updates now (and ScummVM is another way of pushing a fix, as most people have probably built their Ultimate Talkie Editions some years ago, now). But I can send you an email with instructions for patching the scripts, some context and saves, if you'd like.

[LogicDeLuxe]

I found another dead end in Monkey 1 after feeding all the bananas to the monkey:
- park the boat at the shore near the volcano.
- lure the monkey to the volcano and leave with the boat.
- park the boat at the north shore and walk to the volcano from there.
The monkey will teleport to Guybrush, and there is no way to get him back to the south half of the island.

[eriktorbjorn]

Yeah, I wonder if all the translation teams had access to the full scripts with permission to adapt them, or just the raw text without much context. I guess it probably varied.

Recently someone pointed me to this article, about a cancelled Swedish version of The Secret of Monkey Island: https://spelpappan.se/2015/09/hur-the-s ... l-svenska/

The article is mostly (but not entirely) in Swedish. A quick translation of part of it reads:

I did not work with Lucasfilm Games but instead with a German company called SoftGold who handled localizations on the European market. I initially received a floppy with all text strings in the game and it had to be loaded into a special editor so I wouldn't ruin line breaks and such. One string held the original text, and another one had to be filled in by me to say the same thing in Swedish.

It was an incredibly large text file with more than 25 000 characters, as there is a lot of talking in Monkey Island - and a lot of things I did of course recognize from the game, but much of it I had never experienced and did not understand the context of.

For every choice you make there may be up to a dozen possible outcomes - and it was about the worst thing I've ever been through; because I had to play the whole game probably twenty times just to understand the context in which each sentence is said. Additionally I found out that some of the texts weren't even in the game, because they had been cut - but not deleted from the text file!

Unfortunately, he went on to say that he no longer had the floppies with his translation. And neither do the Germans.

I wonder if he meant 25 000 lines. The scanned letter included with the article describes the file as more than 400 KB.

[OmerMor]

I once spoke to the Israeli translator of the (official) Hebrew version of Loom. He told he was working on a Hebrew translation of The Secret of Monkey Island, but they eventually scrapped the project.