Clearly, the poll refers to SCUMM-styled games.., there may be all kinds of games where you can point 'n click, but I've yet to see something on MSX everyone will agree on as a SCUMM-style game.
A SCUMM-like game requires a lot of graphics. Monkey Island has A LOT of unique backgrounds that has to be drawn. Such a game is not cell-based like most of the MSX games. I said ZOO because that game is made out of unique backgrounds.
I played Monkey Island for the first time on PC XT without the mouse,
but I have to admit that it's not that funny without the mouse, and most MSX machines have no mouse.
While games like Monkey Island are too advanced, there are others like King's Quest or Larry that could be made on MSX... a LOT of work, of course, but it could be made.
If MANIAC MANSION was ported to NES and C64 it is fully doable on MSX/MSX2. But "doable" doesn't mean that it WILL BE DONE, just that it COULD HAVE BEEN DONE. Big team. Long time. Useless?
True, it will be a big time project... but would using ScummVM (ScummVM) as a starting point even be remotely useful for a tR/G9K/Moonsound-combo? Or would all work have to be done from scratch?
I suspect that the ScummVM implementation will require too much memory to run on msx. If you want it done right, you probably need to implement in asm from scratch. That said, I think the tR/g9k combo should get you pretty far. But if the development time of ScummVM is any indication, it's an absolutely huge project.
If you make some kind of dump from the scenario from Monkey Island for example and rip all the graphics you already have some starting material. On the mighty www you can find midi versions of all the music so you can make fm/moonsound/scc/etc. versions of it. I am no programmer but why is such an engine so memory "unfriendly"?
Commodore 64 and low-resolution PC versions of "Maniac Mansion" and "Zak McKracken & Alien Mindbenders" doesn´t look too hard to convert them to MSX-1 with reasonably good results.
Sprites of course give flicker, but maybe we could use sprites only for MOVING person(s) and standing persons could be made using software sprites, I don´t mind some colour clash what software sprites can cause and those original sprites of C64 and PC were blocky enough already to make them more suitable MSX software sprites. :) I think it is NOT too big problem if standing characters can´t stand in EXACT position where you have pointed them to walk, 8 pixel accuracy is enough, i think! :) As long as you can smoothly move cursor and enter doors correctly, it can´t be too big problem.
Memory consumption is bigger problem, how many screens are in Maniac Mansion? As one screen takes 7Kb.... but I guess graphics can be packed smaller somehow nowadays.... so maybe you can release it on 256Kb cartridge? :) Was 256Kb biggest cartridge what MSX can use?
Mouse is not a problem, you can always use cursors and joystick, remember? :P
I remember there were even more simpler PC version of Maniac Mansion than which was showed in my link. That simpler PC version looked very SPECTRUM, thought it was not monochrome, but all colours were used something like this: (on y-coordinates) 0-30 purple, 31-60 dark blue 61-90 blue 91-120 dark green etc and everything was monochome against those colours like on spectrum. I couldn´t find such PC screenshot now, but I saw it in some 90s magazine.
If someones are going to convert Maniac Mansion to MSX, I really hope they use ORIGINAL graphics and NOT those NES´ japanese style grafx. Feeling and atmosphere is not the same anynore on japanese cutesy NES conversion.
A SCUMMVM version for MSX would be a big LoL. Dreamming is free you know. Such an implementation for the MSX would require a big team, long development time following a path with many many technical difficulties.
The official port of SCUMMVM for the lowest-end machine (as seen at the download page) seems to be the Atari computers, and even under this architecture, it requires a 68020 processor. Quite far from even a R800 :/
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