The Monkey Island Intro / Brief Gameplay on Apple II
The intro from The Secret of Monkey Island™
and some proof-of-concept Gameplay in Apple II Lores Graphics
Details
I had a half-finished project of getting the Monkey Island theme song
playing on my Apple II with Mockingboard Music.
I finally implemented that, and then of course started wondering
how hard it would be to get a proof-of-concept of the gameplay going.
It is unlikely I'll do much more with this, it is a complex game, much
more so than Myst. To do things properly I'd need to make a SCUMMVM parser
for Apple II, and while that's probably possible (there were earlier
SCUMM games released for Apple II) it's not something I plan on doing
right now.
Implementation
This project targets a 48k Apple II+ system from 1979 with a 1MHz 6502
processor. It is written in 6502 assembly language. The current total
size of the assembled code is ~32k (1k for loader, 7k for the intro, 22k for
the game). The intro itself takes nearly the full 48k to run as the YM sound
data decompresses to 30k in size.
You move the cursor around and click on things. Objects, or nouns, have
callbacks for the 9 verbs you can use on them. Walking around is not
implemented well as each room has irregular areas you can walk to.
Also there are foreground and background graphic layers that must be
applied in the right order.
The graphics were traced from screenshots from the VGA game, much in the
same way the Myst demake was done.
Yes, you can do better than Lores. The original game had a CGA release
and Apple II hires isn't that much worse than that mode. I just like
lores graphics.
Music
I didn't write the AY-3-8910 version of the theme.
The theme is by EPYTEOR/SUTEKH/STARKOS who wrote it as part
of an
Amstrad CPC demo
Video
Capture of the full thing as of version 0.07.
Captured on AppleWin as it's a huge pain trying to record the music off
of my real hardware.
Capture of an older version on an actual Apple IIe. Sorry for the horrible sound quality,
my capture board doesn't like the Mockingboard output and I've yet
to find a good way to get high-quality recordings from it.
Screenshots
These are taken with the AppleWin emulator.
System Requirements
Any sort of Apple II should work (II/II+/IIe)
Should also run on IIc or IIgs but not tested as much
At least 48k of RAM
It will play the intro theme if you have a Mockingboard
sound card
You probably also want a color monitor
In theory the joystick should work.
Downloads
Disk Images
Here is the disk image for v0.08 (28 October 2020) monkey.dsk (140k)
Q. The graphics are ugly and you can't tell what's going on
unless you've played the real game before.
A. Probably
Development Notes
28 October 2020 -- Release v0.08
Minor fix, joystick wasn't disabled by default so the cursor could go
missing if you weren't expecting it. Part of testing on MAME. In theory
the new 0.226 should fix the GR page2 graphics bug, but I'm too lazy to
compile it and the debian version is still at 0.225.
20 October 2020 -- Release v0.07
Recording the playthrough and realized the map was broken. Oops.
Mostly fixed now.
20 October 2020 -- Release v0.06
Finally finished hooking up the Scumm Bar. Also added the first cut scene,
and a chapter transition (with mockingboard music! Though it was a struggle
and I'm still not happy with how the music turned out).
18 October 2020 -- Release v0.05
You can now pick up items, though only two, and you can't actually
do anything with them.
13 October 2020 -- Release v0.04
Was distracted for a bit by the
AppleIIbot on twitter.
A lot of hassle allowing you to walk into the distance.
Finally have all rooms hooked up again, plus some animations.
29 September 2020 -- Release v0.03
Just slowly adding some locations.
19 September 2020 -- Release v0.02
Second release. Co-incidentally "Talk Like a Pirate Day"
Added town and map.
Trying to get a recording on actual hardware but
my video capture card thinks the Mockingboard line out is too loud and
clips and I don't have any other easy option for recording things.
I'd just use a microphone to record the TV output but my family is so loud
I can't get a capture without them drowning it out.
18 September 2020 -- Release v0.01
First release.
I had partially completed code for playing the theme song through
the Mockingboard, so made the intro, and then of course I had the Myst
engine so I wanted to see how much I could quickly put together of the
gameplay. I spent about a week on this. I code 6502 assembly to
relax, you can maybe figure out from that how stressful
these past few weeks have been.
