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Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle,
by dirktheman 11y ago
Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games.
Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlash card. Most of these games are free downloads these days, so we spend hours playing them. Some of them look a bit aged, but generally they hold up pretty well. The experience is still as captivating as it was back then.
- justquestions 11y agoI thought these were all DOS-based (Intel CPU) games... How are you running these on a PowerPC/G3?
- dirktheman 11y agoThey are mostly pre-intel based games, as Apple switched to Intel in 2002. They are free for download through sites like macintoshgarden.org. Otherwise I use an emulator (Basilisk/SheepShaver) on my own PC/Mac.
- justquestions 11y agoThank you. I remember playing some of these on a 486DX-33MHz in the early 90s. I wasn't aware there was a Motorola CPU based version. As others have said, there goes my weekend. Time to dig out my old G4 laptop, or the PowerBook 520c I seem to have kept for some reason... Did I say thank you?
- lobster_johnson 11y agoNitpick: The Intel switch was in 2006.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- thristian 11y agoI don't know how the parent is actually doing it, but many of these classic adventure games date back to a time when there were multiple competing architectures; the games were often written in some kind of bytecode, and getting them running on modern hardware just needs a new implementation of the VM, like ScummVM.
- dirktheman 11y agoI would hardly call my '99 iBook G3 300mhz "modern"...
- vetinari 11y agoScummvm - http://scummvm.org http://scummvm.org Clamshell iBooks are capable of running OSX. Not spectacularly well (they are 366 or 466 MHz machines with limeted RAM), but still.
- dirktheman 11y agoWhile I maxed out on the RAM (a whopping 512MB), as it's one of the first clamshells it's limited by a 300Mhz processor. So no OSX for me. I don't mind, it's on 9.2 right now, which is about the most stable as they come. And with my homemade ssd (CF card with IDE adapter) it's blazing fast!
- vetinari 11y agoI remember running 10.1 and 10.2 on the 466 Mhz/320 MB RAM clamshell. Not very fast, but enough for ScummVM. I didn't know that OSX does not run on the original iBook.
- zephyrfalcon 11y agoI think the highest OS X version you can install on a clamshell is 10.4. I have it on one of mine (with memory maxed out to 576 Mb). As you say, it's not real fast, but ScummVM works, and so do C64 and GBA emulators.
- anthk 11y agoScummvm under Linux Mint PPC should run faster than OSX.
- lambda 11y agoMost of these LucasArts graphical adventure games were written using a game engine known as SCUMM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM) that was able to target different platforms, which was ported to the Mac and so ran on 68k and later PowerPC Macs. There is now an emulator that can play SCUMM games on almost any platform known as ScummVM (http://scummvm.org/ http://scummvm.org/).
- jsingleton 11y agoDon't forget the Indiana Jones games. Fate of Atlantis was a great game. There is also Beneath a Steel Sky which is fantastic and now free. http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky
- justquestions 11y agoDid you ever play "Martian Memorandum", one of the Tex Murphy series?
- dirktheman 11y agoTHANK YOU SO MUCH!! I've been looking for years for this! I thought the name of the game was "under a red moon" or something like that but I couldn't remember. There were some shards of memory from a secret moon base and a head in a water cooler, but I just couldn't recall the name, franchise or anything else to put me in the right direction. AFK right now...
- junke 11y ago"Under a killing moon" is the name of another Tex Murphy game.
- EliRivers 11y agoIf you liked the Tex Murphy games, a new one was made recently with a kickstarter campaign; http://www.bigfinishgames.com/games/tesla-effect http://www.bigfinishgames.com/games/tesla-effect As games go it's a bit hit and miss, but if you already like Tex Murphy, it's a winner.
- jsingleton 11y agoHadn't come across them. Will take a look. Thanks.
- cmcnally 11y agoAnyone remember Torin's Passage?
- soneca 11y agoMe too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game. One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the term "pick up", to pick up a book, for example. My basic english didn't know that verb, I tried every variation of get, hold, put in pocket and stuff.
- hibikir 11y agoKing's quest was easier the alternatives. The worst for foreigners was Police quest. One command was seared into my brain: 'administer sobriety test' Good luck figuring that out with a small learner's dictionary.
- inDigiNeous 11y agoPolice Quest was pretty picky. I remember the scene where you have to get the suspect from the car laying down on the ground. Shouting "Lay Down" would only give you nitpicking about the sexual meaning of "laying", which I never got until later.
- koide 11y agoHeh, this morning I was thinking about this in the shower, don't know why. The worst for me was the part in the sewer, where you had to write "look at shit". I only knew the word's pronunciation. Spent days on the combinations: shed, ched, poop, and so on.
- inDigiNeous 11y agoHehe yeah I remember also going through a dictionary with my friend to look how to pronounce these things, and our mother helped too. Brought together the whole family for a while.
- 11y ago
- dasboth 11y agoI realise my comment won't add much to the discussion, but Day of the Tentacle was a masterpiece.
- crivabene 11y agoDouble Fine is apparently working to release a remastered version next year, and they were able to get the original reworked assets from LucasArts Singapore. http://mixnmojo.com/news/Double-Fine-Has-The-LucasArts-Singapore-DOTT-Assets http://mixnmojo.com/news/Double-Fine-Has-The-LucasArts-Singa...
- Ayaz 11y agoDay of the Tentacle was one of the games I was crazy about as a teen. What a lovely game!
- anc84 11y ago> Most of these games are free downloads these days Not legally, just conveniently.
- vvpan 11y agoBeneath a Steel Sky is completely free
- fla 11y agoGood memories! The Dig deserves a place on that list as well.
- snake_plissken 11y agoalthough it came later, don't forget Outlaws! Maybe the most underrated and unknown top-10 game of all time.
- knicholes 11y agoIf you didn't also play the Leisure Suit Larry series, you have really missed out. Hopefully that was included in your "etc."!
- carbide 11y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned the Quest for Glory series yet (originally Hero's Quest)
- rajacombinator 11y agoQfG 1 (the one that made it to Mac) was pretty OG. Still one of the most creative RPG/adventure games ever.
- anthk 11y agoCHeck Macintosh Garden. And Lubuntu PPC with Scummvm.