Comments | magratpudifoot: "Okay, I guess this is the only treasure I'm gonna get... Stupid cursed whispery parrot..."

magratpudifoot

"Okay, I guess this is the only treasure I'm gonna get... Stupid cursed whispery parrot..."

Jun 07, 2011 00:13

Alright, my darlings, it's time for the results and prize selection for the Pirate contest thingummy!

( Ever-so-slightly-dirty-ish lucre! )

win stuff, aaaargh!, my friends=awesome

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magpieinthesky June 9 2011, 03:34:11 UTC

WOOP WOOP! I am so excited to finally get to play ToMI. Of course, it might help if I ever found/finished Escape, but the whole issue of the games being too old for the newer Windows systems poses a bit of a problem... :P

Anywho! I have a question: is #9 Stan? Because if so, that's obviously got to be my choice. Otherwise, I'll need to mull it over a bit. :D

bizarreoptimism June 9 2011, 11:30:24 UTC

Apparently there's this thing called ScummVM that lets you play some vague selection of older computer games (including the MI games) on newer Windows systems. I haven't the faintest, foggiest concept of how it WORKS, but I did put it on my laptop yesterday and it did therefore allow me to play CoMI.

(Erm ... sort of. I haven't yet figured out how to pause and save a game, if that's a possibility with ScummVM at all, so at the moment it appears that I'd just have to leave my laptop on and the game up and running until I had actually played my way all the way through it -- but at least I can play it at ALL, I guess. :))

Hope that helps a bit. And I would like to say that I feel all computer OS should be backwards compatible when it comes to computer games, a la PlayStation.* I'm going to be very upset when my Oregon Trail stops working, for instance ... :P

* In theory.

magpieinthesky June 9 2011, 12:14:58 UTC

Yeah, the last time I tried that was maybe 2 1/2 years ago, so maybe I'm mixing it up with the time I tried to play Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (yeah, I'm that cool), even with the precautions I took it messed up the system. But maybe it wasn't with CoMI? *sigh* Maybe I should dig out the media in my still-unpacked boxes from college to check anyway...

I'm so with you on making all computer OS backwards compatible. It would make our lives so much easier, and it would make nostalgia that much more accessible! :P

... you have an Oregon Trail game that works? I've been afraid to try to play any Windows 95 games (I'm assuming you're using that version rather than the floppy disc one... but if not, color me impressed) on any new computer, but if there were a way around it, oh the joy that would ensue!

captainchaotica June 10 2011, 00:39:20 UTC

Oh man, I am ALL FOR the idea of computer backwards compatibility. I have _so_ many old DOS games that I really wish I could just, ya know, _start_, by double-clicking them...or that DOSBox at least worked like other emulators. Where you start it up, pick which game you want off a list and _it plays it_. None of this mounting imaginary Z drives and trying to remember syntax nonsense ( ... )

A Note on SCUMM (because I am the biggest nerd ever) magratpudifoot June 10 2011, 01:22:29 UTC

"ScummVM" stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine" SCUMM is the programming language used by LucasArts back in the day for their adventure games, and ScummVM was the program developed later to allow games programmed with SCUMM to be played on newer machines. It has since been expanded to play other games, apparently, but it should play any of the LucasArts games from the 90s, at the very least.

Between CoMI and EfMI, LucasArts switched from SCUMM to Lua...which explains the joke about the bar on Mêlée Island ^_^

magratpudifoot June 10 2011, 01:05:21 UTC

#9 is, indeed, Stan, and he will be headed your way this weekend, barring unforeseen complications of a complicatory nature. OH, how I love/hate Stan...

Escape is not at all necessary for following Tales, any more than the first two are necessary for Curse. I would never dissuade anyone from playing any of the games, but definitely don't think you will be missing anything if you skip ahead.

I have not tried playing any of the older games on my 64-bit machine, but I can vouch for earlier versions of ScummVM being quite helpful. (I can understand why 64-bit makes it tricky to work in back compatibility, and I can accept that I'm going to have to wait a while for someone to work out a hack to play Discworld...but there really was no excuse for 32-bit OSes to not be back compatible. Grr...)

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