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

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

I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. Although 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.

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.

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.

Good question! Since the game is mostly scene-based, it should be possible to fit it into the C64's memory with lots of reading from disk. However the original game also had some larger scenes that used quite a lot of horizontal scrolling, 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.

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.

There are already remakes of MI tunes for C64:

https://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/S-Z/Secret_of_Monk...

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

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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