Monkey Island 2 - Special Edition

[TheJoe]

Originally Posted by Kenko

I wonder why they are there.

Also I finally finished decoding all the 7157 speech-files. Too bad they don't have proper names

If we could decrypt speech.info, I'm sure we could find which lines are which by matching the lines. That's how classic SCUMM worked anyway, you could attach a reference to a speech file in MONSTER.SOU to a line and easily translate that reference.

[Kenko]

Originally Posted by TheJoe

If we could decrypt speech.info, I'm sure we could find which lines are which by matching the lines. That's how classic SCUMM worked anyway, you could attach a reference to a speech file in MONSTER.SOU to a line and easily translate that reference.

Some parts of it is readable, but I don't really know what to look for.

And where do I find the MONSTER.SOU?

[MusiclyInspired]

Originally Posted by TheJoe

I can't get MT-32 tracks, but I can record the music with Shan's soundfont which is very close to it. I would need a lot of time though since I only know how to do it in Linux which I don't have installed right now.

No. No emulators. No soundfonts. A real MT-32 or nothing at all. There really is nothing like it. I have an MT-32. I might be persuaded to take on the task. Can't you extract all the MIDI files from a Scumm game with Scumm Revisited or something? That would make things easier. Then you could compare them with the SE classic soundtrack to get what you need.

I'm still really bummed that the music in the Dinky Island jungle was plain scrapped.

[TheJoe]

Originally Posted by Kenko

Some parts of it is readable, but I don't really know what to look for.

And where do I find the MONSTER.SOU?

MONSTER.SOU isn't used in the SE, it's the file for speech in SCUMM v5. I was just comparing speech.info and how SCUMM used to reference speech.

Can't you extract all the MIDI files from a Scumm game with Scumm Revisited or something? That would make things easier. Then you could compare them with the SE classic soundtrack to get what you need.

Yes. Although General MIDI tracks don't exist in the original MI2, there's only Adlib, PC Speaker and Roland. ScummVM converts them to GM on the fly. I personally don't think the originals sound too good.

[Kenko]

Originally Posted by TheJoe

MONSTER.SOU isn't used in the SE, it's the file for speech in SCUMM v5. I was just comparing speech.info and how SCUMM used to reference speech.

I see.

The line "GUY_103_open-credits_1_1" is next to the line "You guys get out of here!" in the speech.info file. Could this be useful?

[TheJoe]

Originally Posted by Kenko

I see.

The line "GUY_103_open-credits_1_1" is next to the line "You guys get out of here!" in the speech.info file. Could this be useful?

Well it means the line's in there. I tried 0000103.wav, but it's not Guybrush at all. In fact I'm not sure who that is.

[Monkey Mania]

What's the process of getting a custom graphics file to work? I tried Gzipping it but the filesize was wrong.

[ATMachine]

Hey, thanks for the tool, Benny! I've used it to extract the concept art at full size, without those annoying button overlays you see in-game. It's quite nice (and it's how I noticed the early "Crooked Island" name for Booty, which is hidden away written in the corner on one drawing, beneath the giant Back button the SE art gallery superimposes).

[bgbennyboy]

Originally Posted by Monkey Mania

What's the process of getting a custom graphics file to work? I tried Gzipping it but the filesize was wrong.

Basically, strip back the dds header, put back the original 12 byte header, follow it with the gzipped data.

If people really want to do this then I'm sure that I, or someone else will make a tool to do it in the next few days.

[bgbennyboy]

Originally Posted by ATMachine

Hey, thanks for the tool, Benny! I've used it to extract the concept art at full size, without those annoying button overlays you see in-game. It's quite nice (and it's how I noticed the early "Crooked Island" name for Booty, which is hidden away written in the corner on one drawing, beneath the giant Back button the SE art gallery superimposes).

Ta, I've avoided looking too much at the files as I've not completed the game myself yet

[Monkey Mania]

Originally Posted by bgbennyboy

Basically, strip back the dds header, put back the original 12 byte header, follow it with the gzipped data.

If people really want to do this then I'm sure that I, or someone else will make a tool to do it in the next few days.

I'm not sure what you are talking about, but a tool would be very nice.

[myloch]

I heard there were lotta ppl not happy with monkey island 1 SE backgrounds (graphic glitches). what's the situation with the special edition of monkey island 2? Better I hope.

[Meelkee]

Originally Posted by bgbennyboy

I've put together a package to automate the decoding of the MI2 music.
Instructions are in the readme but the process is basically this:

• Drag and drop an .xwb file onto the file named DECODEAUDIO
• It'll take a long time to complete, the new files will be in the "Decoded" folder.
• I've only tested it with MusicNew.xwb as my brain is fried, but I assume it'll work for some of the others.
• See the readme for more information.

Download it here.

Thanks SOOOO much for this. I feel like I'm 12 years old again when listening to all the tunes

One short hint: The conversion takes so long because of all those verbose message lines. So if you want to save many hours, you can just disable them by adding a "-v 0" to the command in the batch file so that it looks like this:

..\unxwb.exe -r "..\ffmpeg.exe -v 0 -i #FILE ..\Decoded\#FILE"

Again, many thanks!

[LogicDeLuxe]

Originally Posted by myloch

I heard there were lotta ppl not happy with monkey island 1 SE backgrounds (graphic glitches). what's the situation with the special edition of monkey island 2? Better I hope.

While there is similar sloppiness, I would say, it is an improvement. The worst example of remaining classic pixels I noticed is at the Scabb island beach left to the camp fire.

[bgbennyboy]

Good idea, I'll add that in now. The package was just hurriedly put together last night so that people could rip the music.

[bgbennyboy]

Meelkee: Thanks for the suggestion, it is indeed a lot quicker

I've updated the download link in my earlier post with the new version.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Largo's easy mode cloth is in his room and the inventory icon is there. I wonder if they actually intended to have easy mode available at one point.
On the other hand, there are highres versions of all the unused inventory icons, which is pretty useless.
The opening sequence backgrounds are there, but merely scaled up. No highres art there.

I wonder, if there are unused voice acting again. Maybe even easy mode texts. I wish, we could extract the voice acting with proper names.

When extracting the commentary file, the extractor asks me to overwrite every single file. It doesn't seem to make any difference if I answer yes or no. Can this be fixed? I don't want to hammer my keyboard for every single who knows how many files.

[MusiclyInspired]

More than likely they just blindly redid every piece of art in the game and didn't even know easy mode existed.

[LordTrilobite]

I'm working on a HD version of one of opeing credits backgrounds as a test to see how it turns out. Would be so awesome if someone is able to 'unlock' the intro.

[bgbennyboy]

Originally Posted by LogicDeLuxe

When extracting the commentary file, the extractor asks me to overwrite every single file. It doesn't seem to make any difference if I answer yes or no. Can this be fixed? I don't want to hammer my keyboard for every single who knows how many files.

Works fine for me, it'll only be asking you that if the files exist and seeing as commentary has names like 0000000c.wav - you've probably extracted files from another soundbank that have the same name.

[LogicDeLuxe]

I just played easy mode. The only thing which isn't right there is the hint system, but if someone uses it, he doesn't need easy mode to begin with.
All easy exclusive stuff seems to work just fine. Well, maybe except when Wally's turning out the light, it is accompanied by a slurping sound. Not exactly what the dialogs suggest. It's probably in the scripts that way, since in Adlib, that sound could be anything.

If you want to try, I made a patch which forces the game to run always in easy mode: http://www.mediafire.com/?20wqej2wk2y
Put the patched monkey2.000 and monkey2.001 to classic\en\
To undo it, just removes the files from classic\en\

[LordTrilobite]

I don't think I've ever played easy mode.
I also never found the dungeon room where Wally is kept.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Originally Posted by LordTrilobite

I also never found the dungeon room where Wally is kept.

In the room with many arrow signs, go front right and then straight through the next screen.

[Tzar Sectus]

Thanks for the easy mode patch! I quickly breezed through it myself. I did notice a few other very minor bugs (had to doubleclick to exit from the woodshop, a few animation glitches in Stan's shop), but it worked just fine. I'm surprised all of the voice acting for easy mode is there. Maybe they removed it since they thought it wouldn't be necessary due to the hint system?

By the way, is it possible to repack the xwb files so you can replace the music in them? The project is probably too ambitious, but it would be nice to replace the classic mode music with MT-32 music.

[Monkey Mania]

a pre-mixed, re-synced bone song could be included also.

[OzzieMonkey]

Hey, if someone can edit this clip into the game somehow, but changing it so that the "you guys get out of here" line is "hey, stop that" from Escape from Monkey Island (Timmy and the bananas) that would be awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TnO_Os9pdQ

[Monkey Mania]

Originally Posted by OzzieMonkey

Hey, if someone can edit this clip into the game somehow, but changing it so that the "you guys get out of here" line is "hey, stop that" from Escape from Monkey Island (Timmy and the bananas) that would be awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TnO_Os9pdQ

Actually, "you guys get out of here" is in the game.

check out 00000e8a.wav

[OzzieMonkey]

Originally Posted by Monkey Mania

Actually, "you guys get out of here" is in the game.

check out 00000e8a.wav

Where is that file?

[LogicDeLuxe]

Originally Posted by Tzar Sectus

I did notice a few other very minor bugs (had to doubleclick to exit from the woodshop, a few animation glitches in Stan's shop), but it worked just fine.

I don't think those are related to the patch. Is there even a difference at Stan's?
In the woodshop, were someone talking by any chance? I noticed, the engine waits for voice playback to be finished before loading the next room, which is generally a good idea, but can be irritating at times.

One particular animation glitch at Stan's is when Guybrush asks about the coffin and actually points in the other direction. That is no SE bug, though, as it was always there before.

I'm surprised all of the voice acting for easy mode is there. Maybe they removed it since they thought it wouldn't be necessary due to the hint system?

I suspect, they just did it like they did in some previous releases too. The easy mode selection is in a room called "copycrap", which has a terrible messy scripting, probably in order to scare of crackers. They just skipped that room altogether, which is very easy to do. On the other hand, there is a boot parameter for easy mode, which they just could have used, but the SE team probably didn't notice that anyways.

[TheHutt]

Are the lines for "things to do after the game" in the game? Maybe they could be unlocked?

[bgbennyboy]

Originally Posted by Kenko

I wonder why they are there.

Also I finally finished decoding all the 7157 speech-files. Too bad they don't have proper names

That can be fixed. The names of the speech files are in the accompanying soundbank (.xsb).

[TheJoe]

I've talked with silverwolfpet at Telltale about an MT-32. Unfortunately, he doesn't have one. But he tells me he'll get in contact with someone who might do.

So now we just need to know how to repack and .xwb and we may have MT-32 music on the way.

[bgbennyboy]

Originally Posted by TheJoe

I've talked with silverwolfpet at Telltale about an MT-32. Unfortunately, he doesn't have one. But he tells me he'll get in contact with someone who might do.

So now we just need to know how to repack and .xwb and we may have MT-32 music on the way.

There are two possible approaches to repacking:

1) Hack the original .xwb file - just changing the data and adjusting the block sizes.

2) Use the Microsoft's XACT tool (the tool that was originally used to build and compile the wavebanks) to make a new one. This might be a simpler approach. XACT comes with the free XNA Game Studio. Note that it only accepts wav/aif/aiff music/sounds so any re-recording shouldnt be encoded in a lossy format as you'd have to convert it back to wav again anyway.

[TheJoe]

Originally Posted by bgbennyboy

There are two possible approaches to repacking:

1) Hack the original .xwb file - just changing the data and adjusting the block sizes.

2) Use the Microsoft's XACT tool (the tool that was originally used to build and compile the wavebanks) to make a new one. This might be a simpler approach. XACT comes with the free XNA Game Studio. Note that it only accepts wav/aif/aiff music/sounds so any re-recording shouldnt be encoded in a lossy format as you'd have to convert it back to wav again anyway.

Good stuff. Do you know of any way to get XACT on its own? Grabbing the entire studio would take a lot of time, I imagine.

[bgbennyboy]

I don't sorry. I just got it with XNA.

I'm currently using it to try and rebuild a wavebank though, to see if I can get one that - while not identical - the game will accept.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Originally Posted by bgbennyboy

2) Use the Microsoft's XACT tool (the tool that was originally used to build and compile the wavebanks) to make a new one. This might be a simpler approach. XACT comes with the free XNA Game Studio. Note that it only accepts wav/aif/aiff music/sounds so any re-recording shouldnt be encoded in a lossy format as you'd have to convert it back to wav again anyway.

Are you sure it doesn't accept compressed WAV files? I didn't try. How does the game use lossy codecs for most of the sounds then? It does use ADPCM for many samples, right?

And I wonder, what do they use Libogg, Libvorbis and Libjpeg for? Their licenses are included in the SE credits, so I assume they are compiled in for some reason.

Originally Posted by bgbennyboy

I'm currently using it to try and rebuild a wavebank though, to see if I can get one that - while not identical - the game will accept.

The bone song sure is worth a try. Mixing the voice acting in, and silence the voice files. That should solve sync problems here for sure.
If you managed to get it working, a patch would be great.

The MT-32 business is a lot more work, of course.

[bgbennyboy]

I meant it doesn't accept them as input. It'll output to a wavebank as ADPCM/xWMA/XMA.

I can only imagine that ogg/vorbis is used in the PS3 version - where wavebanks/soundbanks probably aren't used.

[bgbennyboy]

I got the musicnew wavebank recompiled and after a bit of fiddling (you have to make sure the version and headerversion dwords match) got it to work ingame.

Unfortunately, although internally the names were the same, the order in the wavebank must be important because the wrong tracks played at the wrong times and imuse got very confused.

With a bit more tweaking though I should be able to give you all a working project workflow for replacing the music

[TheJoe]

I've potentially found a FLAC rip of MI2 MT-32 tracks. The catch is, it's a torrent.

Are we OK with packing torrented music, or should we continue to seek a real MT-32 and rip it manually?

[LogicDeLuxe]

Originally Posted by TheJoe

I've potentially found a FLAC rip of MI2 MT-32 tracks. The catch is, it's a torrent.

Is it my remixed version by any chance?

Unfortunately, all available soundtracks are useless because of iMuse. If we want to replace the MT-32 tracks, we have to record the pieces of the original MIDIs separately, so the engine can mix it in real time. This is a big and important difference to the soundtracks meant for listening without the game.