Why does Monkey Island 1 use TFMX for sound?
 

What makes the Amiga version of Monkey Island 1 so special and stand out from the other platforms is definitely the fact that it uses Chris Huelsbeck's glorious TFMX sound system.


However, I've always wondered how that came to be. I mean, wasn't the Amiga version of Monkey Island 1 developed by Lucasfilm in the USA? TFMX, on the other hand, is a very European thing, developed by a comparatively little known small German company. How on earth did it happen that such a big influential company like Lucasfilm chose to go with such an exotic 3rd party sound system instead of using their own? And as it looks they even hired two German composers (Chris Huelsbeck, Rudolf Stember) to port the soundtrack over to TFMX.


Does anybody know how that mysterious collaboration between Lucasfilm and German hobbyists came to be? Or was the Amiga version of Monkey Island developed in Europe by some subcontractor who then chose to use TFMX?

I think it was simply that Lucasfilm and especially the US didn't have the required skilled people to get the very best out of the Amiga.

I would imagine they heard sountracks by Huelsbeck and Stember and realised they wouldn't be able to produce the same results on the Amiga, so opted to offer the contract for Amiga version to Huelsbeck.

It might well have been that Huelsbeck had too much work on and subcontracted to Stember to help out.

LucasArts had very good connections to German developers thru Softgold. Softgold was responsible for localisation and distribution of LucasArts' games in Germany. Softgold itself was part of the Rushware group, which also owned Rainbow Arts since 1986. So that all comes together.

Still a very curious partnership! I wish they had continued it for the other Lucasfilm games as well. The sound in Monkey 2 and Indy IV sucks big time. Just imagine they had done it in TFMX!

I agree. They should have asked Chris Huelsbeck/Rudi stember to make Indy 4 and Monkey 2 musics/sounds.

Lucasarts had the iMuse system by then which could do a lot of wonderful things TFMX could not, like blend songs into each other and make the music environment dependent. Walk around in Woodtick and hear yourself. It is not that one song stops and another one just starts.

i think they were searching for the best option around

in that exact period the Amiga was at the top, even more sound talking

Yeah, it's nice gimmick but from a pure aural perspective TFMX is way superior to that iMuse stuff.



Btw, does anybody know how those iMuse songs are actually stored? Are they the same format for all platforms or are these Amiga-specific arrangements? And why did they leave out so many songs on the Amiga in the first place? Was that purely to save disk space? If it's just about disk space, could the missing songs be taken from other platforms and played using the existing Amiga iMuse replayer?

Same as PC Imuse, with less midi channels :/

And yes, TFMX sound much better.....

After MI1, the Amiga was no longer the prime platform for their games. The PC took over and the Amiga ports became low priority. Also, both MI2 and Indy4 were already hitting limits with 11 disks on the Amiga. There was no room to go with (more) sophisticated music.

This page: https://stelioskanitsakis.medium.com...n-697ed8438a65

quotes the PC version having 3.5 hours of midi music end to end while the Amiga port has 90 mins played of MOD files.

this guy did also an sfx comparison between pc floppy vga and Amiga versions :

https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?p=89132#p89132

Prime platform? The game was originally created for EGA PCs, then the VGA version was made and that became the source for the conversion to the Amiga. The music of the Amiga port shows that Lucasfilm put some effort into the port, but it surely wasn't the the prime platform for the game.

Isn't the Amiga version released before the VGA one ?

Well whoever at Softgold convinced Lucasfilm to use TFMX for Monkey Island deserves one of the top spots in the Amiga games hall of fame because it really makes the Amiga version a unique one of a kind audio experience!

The EGA version was released in October 1990, the VGA version in December 1990 and the Amiga version in mid 1991.

Only serves to prove that the Amiga was their prime platform as they clearly took their time to make sure the Amiga version was really perfect! :crazy

:D:agree

I noticed also that Monkey 2, when run from floppies with 1mb has less sound playing as well. Only some sequences are playing music......

Yeah, there are some subtle differences. IIRC on faster CPUs you get moving clouds on the Monkey 1 title screen and some extra animations.