Monkey Island Madness

[moomoocow42]

Hey there, I just recently bought Monkey Madness and I'm quite frustrated with the sound. It works and everything, but my cd drive is slow and the music lags with the scene. When I enter an area that has music for example it takes the cd player a few seconds, sometimes a minute to read the cd and then start playing the music. Sometimes the music will not play at all. I figured I could bypass this problem by coping the game onto my hardrive but all this does is remove the music entirely when I play it off of that. When I do rip the music files off of the cd, I have no idea where to put them so they work. Could someone help me with this problem? Is ripping the music files the right thing to do? Or am I going about this entirely the wrong way? Thanks in advance for the replies.

[CaliMonk]

What kind of speed is your CDROM drive a 2 speed or something?

I think you need at least a 4 speed one.

As for 'ripping' it and sticking it on your HD, i don't think there are good ways to do this besides using certain cracks and other illegal things, but thats just me speculating.

My advice would be to get a faster CDROM drive, i mean you can get a 4 speed for $10 nowadays...

[scabb]

ScummVM will allow you to run ripped mp3s of the music (which is legal), but it's not a particularly easy process. See the readme file here or head towards their forums.

Although you really should get a new CD drive.

[Huz]

Given that the MI1 music is Redbook audio, a 1x speed CD-ROM drive (if they even exist!) would be sufficient to play the sound.

It sounds as those your CD-ROM drive is just stupid and unable to seek to the audio tracks properly. You probably get this problem on all games utilising CD audio, not that there are many of those any more. As others have said, you do, basically, have two solutions:

1) Get a drive that doesn't suck
2) Go the SCUMMVM route and rip the tracks to MP3 (although, top tip: Ogg is higher quality)

On the outside, you may have a third option:
3) Configure the drive properly. Of course, not being an owner of a chronically stupid CD drive, I can't help you with this one. Sorry.

[Alien426]

Can't you enable DMA mode for CD-ROMs? I know you can for HDs...

[moomoocow42]

Oh wow, a lot of helpful replies in just a day. Ok, I checked out most of the stuff to try and play the mp3s off of my hardrive but it's too complex for me to try. So I guess that I'll just have to suck it up and play it off the cd which isn't too bad, it's just that I'm impatient.

See, the problem is that my cd player isn't bad (at least I don't think it is) or old, I'm pretty sure that it can read 40x, it's just that for some strange reason there is a delay inbetween areas and music.

For example, when I enter an area the cd player will go quiet (not reading data) for a little while, and then whir up if there's music about 10 seconds later to play it. Even worse, when I leave an area, the cd player lags and will take a few seconds to load up the next scene. It's very strange considering it's only about a 4 megabyte game and the fact that this player doesn't give me any other problems playing much much more complex games like morrowind.

Alien426 - I'm not quite sure what DMA mode is, but I'll look into it. Okay, I'm rambling - it's not that big of a deal, more of an annoyance. I'll quit complaining and get back to playing more Monkey Island (yay!).

[MrManager]

I think this is a pretty common issue with the CD-ROM version of MI1 actually. It happens both on my Win98 laptop and my WinXP desktop.

[bgbennyboy]

Yeah happens to me too on XP with various machines.

Another solution is to make a cd image of the disk then mount it in Daemon Tools and play from there.

[moomoocow42]

The whole Daemon and cd imaging strategy works perfectly. Thank you very much for the tip - can finally play the game without skips!