Hi! My name is Joe Jezak and I’ve decided to start working on fixing the issues with Escape from Monkey Island (EMI) in ResidualVM.
Usually, when I start working on a new project, the first step is to see what happens when you run it! So, to get started, I first found my EMI discs:
To prepare the discs for use in ResidualVM, I copied the contents of the Monkey4 directory on both discs to my hard drive. As noted here, you must rename Textures/FullMonkeyMap.imt however, I found that both CD’s files must be renamed, not just the file on disc 2. So, for disc 1, the file must be renamed to Textures/FullMonkeyMap1.imt and for disc 2, the file must be renamed to Textures/FullMonkeyMap2.imt. When copying the files, make sure that you copy the .m4b files from the MonkeyInstall directory as well! Finally, I found that the voiceAll.m4b file must be copied from disc 1, the copy from disc 2 causes an MD5 error. Also remember that you may need to copy the patch (if needed) and the data file from the Residual project into your EMI data directory.
Okay, so now, we have the game data files. Great! The next step is to fetch the ResidualVM source code and build it by following these directions. That wasn’t too bad! It compiled cleanly on the first try with no issues. I started up the build and set it up by adding a game and pointing it at the location I stored the data files.
Now, I crossed my fingers and started up the game and it worked! Kind of:
It was apparent that there is an issue with fading between images, resulting in weird output like this. A bug to add to the list! However, things actually work a whole lot better than this first impression would seem. I was able to complete the whole first act (Act 0?) without any game breaking bugs. There were plenty of issues, such as the hot coal floating around like mad and the wick on the cannon not burning away, but the game was playable. Great!
So, where to from here? Helpfully, the current build prints out a large number of debugging messages from the Lua interpreter pointing out places where there is missing code. I decided to pick one and see if I could figure out what needed to be in this function. But that’s for the next entry, this one has gone on long enough.