[Coop]

Gk2 was suppose to be longer?

[ATMachine]

Gk2 was suppose to be longer?

Yeah. As I recall, GK2 was originally supposed to ship on 9 CDs, with 9 chapters of play. In one of them, you would have played Ludwig when he hid the pieces of the Wagner opera. Also, the two parts of Chapter 6 were probably intended to be separate chapters.

Sierra hit the roof at the costs of burning 9 CDs per game, though, so they made Jane Jensen condense it. Some of the cut material made it into the ultra-rare GK2 novelization.

[Coop]

Wow thats cool...is there a site that has what was cut and what is in the book?

[ATMachine]

There's no site which gives the full details, and if you want the novelization of GK2, you'll have to track it down yourself, I'm afraid.

Try starting with sites such as abebooks.com or alibris.com. They've got databases of titles from lots of small bookstores.

[Aurebesh]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

This is a savegame for the Fists Path in FoA PC CD, just before going to Thera. It is NOT for use in ScummVM, but instead it works in the original game interpreter (or in DOSBox). The directory it goes in on my computer is C:\FATE\ .

Walkthrough for the v2 demo and full game Thera area on Fists Path:

Well, I finished the v1 demo using your walkthrough, so the two demo versions are identicle. I also checked the CD version, and indeed it's identicle to the demos. However, I now know why I thought that the demo puzzles are unique - I never played the CD version! Did any of you play the floppy version? That's the only version I played, and the Thera sequence in this version is totally different. First, when I choose the fists path in the floppy version, Sophia doesn't even join me. I've attached a screenshot of the path choosing moment (floppy version):



What am I supposed to choose so I will later reach the Thera sequence found in the demos and CD version? The middle option is for the fists path, but if you choose it Sophia won't join you! So it can't be that!

Well, I dug out my old saved games from the floppy version, and it turns out I made one just before going to Thera, especially for the purpose of comparing it to the demo. I attached this saved game. If you load it, use the taxi and choose Thera on the map. You'll discover a completely different Thera sequence!! Even the map is different! Here are screenshots comparing the maps:

map from the demos and CD version


map from floppy version



And here's a screenshot demonstrating how the floppy Thera sequence is different from the CD Thera sequence:



No Jeep!!!

This is very weird, because I didn't think that anything was changed during the floppy-to-CD conversion. Can the Thera sequence found in the demos and CD version also be found in the floppy version, and vice versa (and can anyone supply a saved game)?
Besides, I thought the demos were for the floppy version, so it doesn't make sense that they will feature exclusive scenes from the CD version...
By the way, I found something that's identicle in the demos and floppy version, but different in the CD version - in the first page of the Lost Dialogue of the CD version, it says "To be safe, I've sent a copy to Sprague", while in the demos and floppy version it says: "To be safe, I've sent a copy to Ashkenazy". Very weird indeed.

[Kurufinwe]

Tsk tsk tsk. You're mistaken, Auberesh. You can go to Thera during two paths: wits and fists. The sequence you're referring to is from Wits, the one in the demo from Fists (and takes place much later on in the game, after you've found Sophia in Crete).

And some details (name of the collection in which the Lost Dialogue is, its location at Barnet College, the correct positions for the stone discs...) are changed randomly at the beginning of the game.

[ATMachine]

Again, Kurufinwe is right. The sequence you described, Aurebesh, is from the Wits Path, while the one shown in the demo is from the Fists Path.

Both Thera sequences appear in both the floppy and the CD versions of the FoA. Nothing is changed in the conversion. Take my word for it.

Sophia does join Indy near the end of the Fists Path; he rescues her from the Nazis in the Crete labyrinth. By the time Indy enters Atlantis, she's a prisoner again.

[Kurufinwe]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

By the time Indy enters Atlantis, she's a prisoner again.

Yeah, again. (silly girl)

Oh, and while we're discussing FOA, ATMachine, would you happen to have a complete points list for it? Mine is still missing 17 points (probably beating Arnold and the prison guard, but I'd like to be sure).
(Yes, I know I've already asked for that on these forums twice already... If ATMachine can't help me, I promise I'll give up.)

[ATMachine]

That would be exactly the missing 17 points out of 1000. I don't have a point list typed up, but my old copy of the FoA hint book has one printed in it. It says that knocking out Arnold and the Atlantis Nazi prison guard in fair fights nets you 10 and 7 points, respectively.

Incidentally, there was one other fight I could never seem to win. The Nazi Hans in the Labyrinth on the Fists Path was too much for me; I always had to use the "kill him by knocking a stone slab on him" method.

[Kurufinwe]

Thanks a lot!

And, yes, I managed to beat Hans... once. But it's very hard, because you have very little room to step back.

What I found disappointing is that I once hacked my ScummVM iq-points file (the one in the game uses some kind of checksum, I think, that makes it harder to do that, but ScummVM is far more accomodating) to get 1000 points. And... nothing! The game just gives the score at the end, and nothing more! No congratulations, no extra Easter egg, nothing! Sierra games knew much better how to make replaying to get all the points worth the player's while.

[nikoniko]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

A site with numerous screenshots of Loom for the PC Engine/TurboGrafix-16 console. It was a strange 64-color upgrade of the EGA version. Yes, 64 colors.

Interesting. I'll have to check that out sometime on emulation. I didn't even know there was a TG16 version of Loom.

(Now branching off into something a bit technical, so anyone who isn't an old programming geek like me might want to skip the following.)

This reminds me of something I've wondered before and never found the answer to: did any adventure games ever make use of the programming trick which allowed the EGA to display all 64 colors at once, 16 colors per line? Basically it worked by intercepting the horizontal retrace before each new line and then loading a new palette. Without some careful forethought, it would be difficult to have a moving character with such a system, since you'd have to make sure that each of the character's colors were present in the palette of each line, but for creating slightly more colorful static screens or screen regions it would have been useful. As a curious teenager, I programmed a short graphically-enhanced text adventure (similar to The Pawn) this way, but I never observed the technique used in a commercial product, probably due to its added complexity for arguably marginal gain. If such a thing exists, though, I'd like to find it! Man, I wish I still had that game... there wasn't much to it, as it was written pretty quickly for a high school project, but it sure would be nice to see again

A similar technique could be done in the VGA/MCGA 320x200 256-color mode, but there was not enough time to load an entirely new palette, only a partial - so one could incrementally change the palette going down the screen. I mainly used this in a utility I wrote to convert Amiga 4096-color HAM mode graphics to display on the PC, and it worked pretty well. Again, it would only really be useful for static graphics. Still, I wonder if any games used the technique?

Cheers,
doroposo

[nikoniko]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

This page has screenshots from the Famicom version of Maniac Mansion, which has entirely different graphics from those in the US/Europe NES port.

Just checked out your page there. Nice job putting together all those screens! By the way, to answer your question about the red object, it's a public mailbox. See here or here for a examples of the real thing.

[ATMachine]

If you liked those two pages you should really check out the rest of my website if you haven't already. It's full of information on strange versions and pre-release stuff in LucasArts and Sierra games.

You've probably browsed through it by now, but I just wanted to be sure you knew.

And thanks for the information about the mailbox! But what sort of person has a public mailbox on his/her front lawn?

[Kurufinwe]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

And thanks for the information about the mailbox! But what sort of person has a public mailbox on his/her front lawn?

Actually, I'd have enjoyed something like that in the PC release. When I played the game as a kid, I had no idea how to send things to the publisher. Maybe putting things in your mailbox and using the little flag to indicate that you want to send something is what you do in the US, but I'd never heard of such a thing.

[BerserkerTails]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

Some of the cut material made it into the ultra-rare GK2 novelization.

I've been searching for that book for so long now... I did find a copy of the first one, but the Beast Within still aludes me... Curse you Jane Jensen (Not really)!!

[Aurebesh]

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Tsk tsk tsk. You're mistaken, Auberesh. You can go to Thera during two paths: wits and fists. The sequence you're referring to is from Wits, the one in the demo from Fists (and takes place much later on in the game, after you've found Sophia in Crete).

I realized that I never really played the fits path it makes sense, I always hated action elements. Anyway, I sat down and finished the fists path finally, after 13 years.
Well, that settles it then. The FoA demo is not important for my collection. I collect demos that feature a new story (albeit a very short and simple one). I'd hardly call that a collection, because I have only 3 (one for SQ6 and two for Freddy Pharkas) for now. Anyone knows if there are any more of these?

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Oh, and while we're discussing FOA, ATMachine, would you happen to have a complete points list for it? Mine is still missing 17 points (probably beating Arnold and the prison guard, but I'd like to be sure).

Can you please attach your (now complete) point list?

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Sierra games knew much better how to make replaying to get all the points worth the player's while.

Really? I thought they did it only in a few games (like LSL7). Can you give some examples? I never really had the patience to try to get full scores, especially because I thought I wouldn't get anything special for it...

Originally Posted by ATMachine

But what sort of person has a public mailbox on his/her front lawn?

Heh, the Edisons
But seriously, it's not exactly their front lawn, I think it's outside their property. Btw, did you try using this mailbox for sending outgoing mail when you played the Famicom version?

Originally Posted by doroposo

This reminds me of something I've wondered before and never found the answer to:

What you describe sounds similar to the CGA composite mode, where all 16 colors were used at once on a composite monitor, so games appeared with 16 colors instead of just 4 (all of the early Sierra games supported this mode). Some people are discussing this and similar matters here, perhaps you can ask them. However, note that the thread I gave you a link to is now 18 pages long, and not all of it is about discussing IBM graphic cards.

[Kurufinwe]

Originally Posted by Aurebesh

Can you please attach your (now complete) point list?

There you go. It's ugly, but at least I think it's clear.
'Game order' (the leftmost column) refers to the order in which the points are stored in the iq-points file; it was very useful to me to guess where I had missed points, and probably gives some insights on the way the game was developped; it seems for instance that the whole car chase in the Wits path was added very late in the development process.

Really? I thought they did it only in a few games (like LSL7). Can you give some examples? I never really had the patience to try to get full scores, especially because I thought I wouldn't get anything special for it...

Well, there wasn't much, but at least you got a nice congratulations message. And, in LSL6, the counter exploded when the score reached 1000. It's better than the absolute nothingness you got in Indy 4.

[ATMachine]

Originally Posted by Aurebesh

Heh, the Edisons
But seriously, it's not exactly their front lawn, I think it's outside their property. Btw, did you try using this mailbox for sending outgoing mail when you played the Famicom version?

No; there's probably no point, because in addition to the public mailbox out by the driveway, the Edisons also have a private mailbox in front of their house, as in other versions of MM.

Monkey Island 1's playable demo had puzzles that weren't in the final game; you had to find two components of a magic phrase and tell them to a troll guarding the way out of Melee Town.

That particular demo comes in the Passport to Adventure demo pack (of Loom, Indy 3, and MI1) and in a standalone demo. It's EGA only, unless you get the Amiga version of the demo, which is in 32 colors.

[Ninth]

Originally Posted by Aurebesh

By the way, I found something that's identicle in the demos and floppy version, but different in the CD version - in the first page of the Lost Dialogue of the CD version, it says "To be safe, I've sent a copy to Sprague", while in the demos and floppy version it says: "To be safe, I've sent a copy to Ashkenazy". Very weird indeed.

That's not weird, it's just that there are three (or four, I can't remember) possible locations for Plato's Lost Dialogs, requiring to solve different puzzles in the Barnett University to get them. The location depends on the collection, so there are also 3 or 4 possible collections.

[nikoniko]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

No; there's probably no point, because in addition to the public mailbox out by the driveway, the Edisons also have a private mailbox in front of their house, as in other versions of MM.

Actually, there is a point: as a Japanese person would have no idea that putting the flag up on the American-style mailbox means the carrier should pick up its contents, I'd wager that the red postbox does indeed work, and that would be the whole reason they put it there. As I live in Japan for most of the year, I can very much assure you that if you put outgoing mail in your personal mailbox, the mail carrier will happily ignore it for as long as you'd like to leave it sitting there. Everyone uses the red postbox to send mail. If I can find a copy somewhere, I'll have to check it out! I'm also curious to read the text in the game and see if there's anything interesting about the translation.

By the way, it's amazing what you've put together on your site! I really enjoyed browsing through it, and I thought of something to tell you about a comment you made on the Dark Forces for Mac page. The scaling technique you noticed being used on menus is actually used in most (if not all) of the Lucasarts Mac adventures, starting with SOMI, though it might not be immediately obvious in all cases since they sometimes redid the text in high res (for example, Last Crusade). But all backgrounds and animations were scaled that way, so that they could ship the original 320x200 assets without modification for use on the Mac's 640 pixel-wide display. It was a very smart technique, called EPX (or Eric's pixel expansion) after Eric Johnston, the programmer at LucasArts who invented it. Most importantly, it could be done very fast, so the user's experience was never sullied by loading delays or choppy animation. Dark Forces even cheats by using the same technique not only on menus, but to load and re-render the textures in the game (of course it only does so only once, on load, or else performance would suffer in a game of that nature, despite the algorithm being very fast).

Since the quality of EPX was for the most part very good, this saved Lucasarts a lot of work, and also had the side effect of saving disk space since hi-res files weren't needed.

If you're ever looking for another page to add to your already great site, you could take a few screenshots from the DOS and Mac versions of a few games and display them side by side to showcase the brilliance of Mr. Johnston. The technique is now better known as advmame2x, I believe, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it was first developed for adventure games by a creative guy from Lucasarts.

If you're interested in learning more about it, you could check out Aaron Giles' page. He took over the Mac ports after Eric Johnston left, and writes a little bit about EPX on his Scumm page. Aaron also added his own twist to EPX: since merely doubling the artwork filled only 640x400 out of the Mac's 640x480 screen, resulting in a somewhat squashed look, he came up with the idea of also doubling every fifth line of the display, the stretch the picture to the right aspect ratio. It wasn't beautiful, but it worked well enough if you couldn't get used to the squashed effect. And fortunately, he kindly provided an option to turn this feature on or off (didn't care for it myself).