alt.hn

3/17/2026 at 4:00:28 AM

Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

 https://pixeldust.se/monkey-island-project

by aresant

3/17/2026 at 5:16:50 AM

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

by jonny_eh

3/17/2026 at 5:55:57 AM

Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8

Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.

by no-name-here

3/17/2026 at 6:03:15 AM

Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).

And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.

by wk_end

3/17/2026 at 6:13:44 AM

> I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.

I'd personally say the EGA portraits look far more uncanny, resembling early CGI, while the VGA version looks like a hand-drawn book illustration. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181 Still, opinions can differ.

> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT

That may be true, yes.

by no-name-here

3/17/2026 at 3:09:52 PM

There are great CRT-shaders these day that would remedy this.

by Tommix11

3/17/2026 at 7:04:38 AM

Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).

The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.

Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.

by canpan

3/17/2026 at 12:47:09 PM

> Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega

I'm not sure. The dithering is obviously different, not only harsher but in different places in many scenes. Also, the splash screen doesn't have scrolling clouds in the CGA version. And there are other subtle changes.

Call me weird but there's a certain charm to the CGA version, though it's obviously the worst of them. My favorite is the EGA version.

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 7:23:57 AM

This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.

In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.

by haspok

3/17/2026 at 12:41:05 PM

Old CRTs helped blur the image. For that matter, C64 games on TV screens (which is how most people watched them, even though there existed dedicated Commodore monitors) blurred the image so much, the games barely resembled what you can see now with an emulator and a modern screen. Graphics were designed with this in mind.

> It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.

In many cases, especially in the early days, artists didn't know what to do with so many colors, and produced inferior versions. Loom is a good example. The conclusion is that it's less about hardware capabilities and more about artistry, and technical limitations often force artists to be ingenious.

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 8:44:33 AM

Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.

by rob74

3/17/2026 at 9:45:49 AM

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.

by rustyhancock

3/17/2026 at 10:06:56 AM

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.

by whywhywhywhy

3/17/2026 at 6:31:09 AM

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.

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 7:50:08 AM

This sounds so snobby. VGA Loom was absolutely stunning. I can understand that you may appreciate EGA more, but "messed up" sounds hyperbolic imo.

by Subdivide8452

3/17/2026 at 11:18:49 AM

I won't go over the details, but if you look at the website mentioned in the other thread from 2021, you'll see I'm not being hyperbolic.

EGA Loom is a work of art. VGA Loom misread the style and completely obliterated it, in its eagerness to deploy that early VGA "pillow shadow" style so typical of games of that era. (I love the term "pillow shadow", so apt now that I've learned it!).

Every nightly blue gone, light sources broken, every shadow gone, ominous deep-black tree shadows converted into gray/brownish things, etc.

To be clear, I think this is less a limitation of VGA and more a case of the conversion done lazily and/or by an inferior artist.

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 10:08:05 AM

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

by whywhywhywhy

3/17/2026 at 11:16:08 AM

I indeed meant Loom!

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 6:17:06 AM

I must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia.

Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly on.

I even bought the fake retroremake Eternal Castle, which is a loving homage to that era.

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 8:32:10 AM

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-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...

by rob74

3/17/2026 at 9:54:35 AM

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.

by yason

3/17/2026 at 9:45:59 AM

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.

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 11:36:36 AM

Watching this, neither version seem as good as I remember the Amiga version looking, which was still dithered but looked better than the EGA version. Obviously hard to say without a direct video comparison.

by ralferoo

3/17/2026 at 8:59:12 AM

God, I wish a new modern game would capture the essence of Monkey Island, which for me was the ISLANDS themselves.

I didn't care much about the actual main story, Ron Gilbert was never serious about the story anyway (and he coldly murdered it in the long-awaited "official" sequel, Return)

But I loved how each island was like a unique mini world onto itself, and as a kid it really struck me how it was always night on some islands and always day on others (which I later liked to headcanon as being set on a tidally-locked planet :)

Chapter 2 of LeChuck's Revenge is one of my best memories in gaming. Why haven't any modern games tried to recapture that piratey seabreeze freedom of exploring many different islands?

Maybe they could pull a Thimbleweed Park and do a "spiritual successor" in all but name, like it did with Maniac Mansion, and call it Ape Archipelago or something :)

by Razengan

3/17/2026 at 1:01:13 PM

> I didn't care much about the actual main story, Ron Gilbert was never serious about the story anyway (and he coldly murdered it in the long-awaited "official" sequel, Return)

I get what you mean, but I thought Return was a genuinely good game, done with passion, and miles better than the other MI sequels after 2. Of course, the original MI is still my favorite, followed closely by MI 2.

It's a shame some fans turned so toxic, Ron Gilbert had to turn off comments in his blog (edit: but I see has has since turned them back on. Yay!).

by the_af

3/17/2026 at 10:13:32 AM

When I was a little kid Monkey Island honestly felt magical, even though the gameplay is essentially a linear puzzle it really did feel like you were walking around a little living world and just how cinematic and seamless the opening titles are to the first scene too just didn't feel like any other videogame, more like a little movie world.

But yeah the best thing about it was always the atmosphere and world, less so the writing.

by whywhywhywhy

3/17/2026 at 4:29:19 PM

I would have loved if Guybrush vs LeChuck were just something in the background lore, and you were an actual nobody pirate just hanging out with random characters like Kate Capsize, Stan, and all the other quirky one-shot NPCs and have side quests with each.

Like imagine a side arc to overthrow Governor Phatt and so on :)

by Razengan

3/17/2026 at 12:25:30 PM

The artwork is an unique style and a part that takes most time, trying to find artists that who are available for commission is where I'm struggling at for my game.

Trying to keep integrity and genuine without using AI but it's looking like I may have to originate to pixel art style.

by doublerabbit

3/17/2026 at 6:01:49 AM

A very wise move! With the current state of AI, the loss and cost of RAM, with GPUs and CPUs being eaten up, we'll all need to move back to C64s soon.

Really, and I mean this honestly, I had immense fun on my C64 using BBSes, playing games. It wouldn't be the worst fate, if everyone moved back to BBSes + games like this on the C64.

A neat project.

by b112

3/17/2026 at 8:47:51 AM

I do not and have never owned a C64, but Monkey Island is (in my opinion) one of the pinnacles of gaming so this effort to extend it to yet another platform is wonderful to see!

by sp8

3/17/2026 at 6:51:39 AM

Looks good, I had a C128 but played The Secret of Monkey Island around its release but didn't know there was an EGA version. It looks like the two were released apart by just a few months.

Definitely in this era the C64 hardware held up better for longer than expected. I didn't feel the x86 side caught up and surpassed the C64 as an entire package in both graphics and sound until the 486 era. A platform that was truly cursed on the gaming side for a long time due to its primary market focus being business use. And here I am using a 9850X3D with 5070 GPU, distant descendents of our old 286 hardware that I would play Monkey Island on.

by BuckRogers

3/17/2026 at 8:54:32 AM

My AMD 286 with a sound blaster absolutely destroyed a C64 in games. Gosh, I played Monkey Island VGA and Wing Commander on it.

by glimshe

3/17/2026 at 4:43:17 AM

Those backgrounds look so good. I wonder if they'll be able to do anything with the iconic music.

by simonw

3/17/2026 at 4:51:18 AM

With a SID? No problem. I think the title track could be arranged very easily for three voices.

by classichasclass

3/17/2026 at 8:03:29 AM

You can do amazing things with only a single SID channel. One of the most impressive examples is the in-game music of Hawkeye [1] which allows to use the remaining two channels for sound effects.

[1] https://youtu.be/es-rWnVSJ1c

by nwellnhof

3/17/2026 at 5:04:21 PM

That was incredible.

by simonw

3/18/2026 at 7:06:58 AM

That was made by Jeroen Tel, one of the wizards of the C64 music scene. See this for another example of a technical feat with the SID chip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYnwR16NbPE

by selcuka

3/17/2026 at 6:47:30 AM

Even the PC speaker version is pretty good, so I would absolutely second this.

by hannes0x21

3/17/2026 at 6:10:39 AM

[dead]

by constructrurl

3/17/2026 at 9:06:20 AM

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 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?

by weinzierl

3/17/2026 at 12:46:33 PM

I'm not so familiar with the C64, but Monkey Island did indeed use graphics mode on all the 16/32 bit systems it supported - PC graphics cards had their video memory on the card (same as they do today), so saving memory by using text mode didn't make sense. The only problem with that was that the CPU had to be used for any processing of the video memory, so especially scrolling the whole screen was sometimes a bit slow with weaker CPUs. The Amiga and Atari ST didn't have a dedicated text mode.

by rob74

3/18/2026 at 7:16:41 AM

Text mode with user-definable multi-colour characters was mostly a 8-bit exclusive feature. Another reason C64 used that trick was the hardware scroll feature, which allowed shifting the whole screen between 0 to 7 pixels. It was much faster to copy 25x80 characters (as compared to copying a hires/multicolour bitmap with a 8 pixel offset) after the 7th pixel, and reset the scroll bit to 0.

by selcuka

3/17/2026 at 9:17:58 AM

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

by hansjorg

3/17/2026 at 8:48:38 AM

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.

by xecaz

3/17/2026 at 8:57:18 AM

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 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.

by rob74

3/17/2026 at 9:59:07 AM

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.

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 5:28:52 AM

Ambitious.

I wonder how many floppies it will be.

by qmr

3/17/2026 at 8:00:35 AM

The EGA version was 4 1.44MB disks for MS-DOS, IIRC. Let's say 5MB. That's about 30 disk sides or 15 disks in DD disks. Not that bad actually, and perhaps the C64 images are smaller or more compressible than the EGA ones... So this should be some kind of an upper limit.

by haspok

3/17/2026 at 8:48:18 AM

It has to be less if they don't want to spoil the in-game 'insert disk 144' joke ;)

by bzzzt

3/17/2026 at 11:12:05 AM

IIRC, the original CGA/EGA version was: 8x 360KB 5.25" disks, or 4x 720KB 3.5" disks.

by faragon

3/17/2026 at 10:23:45 PM

Afaik Amiga was 4 720KB disks for 32 color version.

by rasz

3/18/2026 at 3:21:50 AM

DD floppies. Amiga's track format got 880KB out of these.

Notably, this is one game that needed RAM expansion on A500, would not work with just the builtin 512KB.

C64 can cheat via cartridge mapper.

by snvzz

3/17/2026 at 7:52:27 AM

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

by Subdivide8452

3/17/2026 at 9:33:02 AM

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'.

by flohofwoe

3/17/2026 at 8:39:11 AM

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 ramps which can make dithering look a lot better.

In addition, the C64 has restrictions on the number of colors you can use in the same 8x8 block which I don't think EGA had.

It takes an artist to turn a CGA/EGA image into a C64 image.

by vintermann

3/17/2026 at 9:08:12 AM

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.

by rob74

3/17/2026 at 10:08:11 AM

> this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color

Which one? The listed palette looks nothing like the screenshot on the same page.

Notably, there's no way that light blue for example (which is the default font and border), nor the dark blue (which is the default background).

The screenshot is how I remember the C64, and consistent with other screenshots and photos. The listed hex codes are far off.

The one posted by the person you responded to is a bit muted, but the relative colors seems closer to what I'd expect.

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 10:17:54 AM

This is the link you're looking for: https://www.colodore.com/

If you're interested in how this palette (editor) was derived, read this: https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/.

The discussion on the above site is an update of the original post by the same author: https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/

by kleiba

3/17/2026 at 10:20:09 AM

On my screen that doesn't match videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's. (It also doesn't match my memory of them, but that's a whole lot less reliable)

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 10:52:28 AM

I would actually find it surprising if it did match videos of actual C64s on actual CRTs, because of the many conversion layers.

by kleiba

3/17/2026 at 11:05:32 AM

Videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's are pretty consistent other than brightness, though, so if it doesn't at least somewhat match those, the model is broken.

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 11:49:14 AM

Interesting. I have the pixel art book Pepto refers to, it is very nice.

by vintermann

3/17/2026 at 5:04:48 AM

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

by p0w3n3d

3/17/2026 at 6:11:53 AM

I don’t get your concern. Could you please be a bit more specific?

The artist and its partner are two high profile guys from the demo scene. They know what they are doing and the game logic ain’t that complicated since point and click is deterministic and finite. This ain’t no open world game.

The challenges evolve around the graphics. Interlaced multi screen multi color pixel art is the bottleneck here. IRQ loaders are bound to available cycle time so there won’t be any usage of FLI.

Since no ascii graphics compression is possible the designers need to consider the amount of branches you can take to several local views when walking around the huge map. Too many graphic details will amount to huge loading times - a problem the later Monkey Island games back then already faced.

Since the C64 graphics modes are not dynamic you can predetermine them by a simple formula: more beauty amounts to more memory usage alias overall loading times.

Using not the full screen is a slight advantage here.

I believe the guys will come up with a great game. It won’t be fast paced this is for sure but it won’t be a beauty killed by its loading times like it is 1987 either.

by _the_inflator

3/17/2026 at 5:24:59 AM

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.

by classichasclass

3/17/2026 at 9:21:18 AM

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.

by joachimma

3/17/2026 at 10:40:53 PM

As always in demo scene we speak about limits we put on ourselves. If the contest is "64K game" this probably won't fit - but not sure. Thus my question.

Of course everything can be put on cartridge (fast) or a diskette (slow loading). If they decide on cartridge, correct me if I'm wrong, it won't work on emulators, right? Also characters and animations must fit in memory too. There are so many technical barriers to be sorted out aside from the backgrounds. That's all what I am wondering about.

by p0w3n3d

3/18/2026 at 1:42:04 PM

Most emulators support .crt images, including large ones like these, so if this is their chosen distribution format they should work just fine on an emulator. They would also be okay on systems like the Ultimate 64, or real machines with EasyFlash or a 1541-Ultimate (which I use with my 128DCR).

by classichasclass

3/17/2026 at 10:11:45 AM

One floppy holds 176KB per side. One full screen of bitmap graphics is 8KB+1KB color, but the game fills only about 2/3 of the screen, so lets say 6KB w/o any compression.

I don't think it's a problem. The game is static enough I think it'd even be viable to hide most loading time even from a real floppy w/behind animation (e.g. slow down door opening and a fade long enough for a decent fast loader to load 6KB)

by vidarh

3/17/2026 at 5:13:13 AM

You can load from disk (or tape) on-demand?

by eru

3/17/2026 at 6:47:22 AM

There had already been an attempt in 2023 https://www.lemon64.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island

Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion

by andrea76

3/17/2026 at 8:41:17 AM

> Unofficial conversion of the 1990 PC/Amiga game by Lucasfilm, developed using the D42 Adventure System from Out of Order Softworks.

D42 is a system for making text adventures, not graphics adventures, so I wouldn't be surprised if the conversion ended up sub par.

https://www.protovision.games/games/d42.php?language=en

by kleiba

3/17/2026 at 5:03:08 AM

Seriously good-looking gfx - kudos!

by nnevatie

3/17/2026 at 7:21:39 AM

[flagged]

by harmf