Monkey Island: was it slow on a 7Mhz Amiga?

[Gaula92]

Hello

I've just installed Monkey Island on my Minimig. It has 2MB chip + 2MB Slow RAM.
I have installed it via the default installer included with the game, no WHDLoad was used.

The problem is that the game seems to be a pretty slow compared to the PC version on a 286-386 machine: Guybrush movement is jerky, with very few animation frames.
Of course, I can put my Minimig in turbo mode, wich makes the game as smooth as I remember it, but I wanted to know if the game is really that slow on a 7Mhz amiga, or is it minimig's fault.

regards

[Arnie]

I remember playing it on an A600 1mb and it was smooth. Playing it later on an A1200 was like playing in turbo mode.

[Adropac2]

Bit of a dog on the A500 regards to how many frames displayed in those animations, but it was still fully playable of course. So yes this was just how it was. Great on the A1200 though as that extr speed making the difference

The second game did at least take advantage of the better Amiga scrolling and anyway i'm sure it could be easily argued that these games were far from being optimised anyway? just ported over

[clauddio]

yes monkey island is slow like a turtle in the A500...on the A1200 runs faster
I played it on the time era A500 and external floppy drive...was very funny play it from floppy...much nostalgic and better than hardisk

on the other way monkey island 2 is unplaylable from floppy you need to install it on hardisk otherwise loading times and diskchange are frustrating

[Mequa]

Remember that SCUMM games use an interpreter, so are a bit slow on a CPU of that speed. These games are also basically PC ports, and so not really as optimised for Amiga hardware as other games. Fate of Atlantis chugged on a 14MHz Amiga 1200, even with only 32 colours. Of course, being a non-action game, it was still fully playable with a low framerate (apart from the optional fighting/beat-em-up sequences).

[gary]

Monkey Island 1 on my Amiga500 was OK. Scrolling across a long scene was far from smooth but I don't think any of the Lucasfilm advanture games made good use of the Amiga hardware. Disk loading was not great and even worse for Monkey Island 2, but because the game was really good it was tolerable.

This video is how I remember it (except for the floppy loading times). If the minimig is slower than this then I would say that it is the minimigs fault.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Gaula92]

I've also found that clouds behind the mountain in the tittle screen are NOT shown in 7Mhz mode, but they are visible in TURBO mode (fast CPU in the Minimig).
Does this game show/hide those clouds depending on CPU speed? Did you ever notice that?

[Mequa]

The Amiga version of Monkey Island 2, although having a reduced colour palette, had better scrolling than the PC VGA version (though not perfectly smooth by any means), such as in the scene with Guybrush crossing the swamp.
Although it had less music, some of the MI2 Paula soundtracks do sound better than the PC Adlib versions.

AFAIK, although ScummVM will play most classic versions of Monkey Island 2, the smoother scrolling in the Amiga version isn't (yet) supported by ScummVM, but works fine under WinUAE.

[jeff b00toNic]

I remember slowdowns in Monkey 1 when the background (or actual scene) was animated
like the Scumm Bar. But without animation it was just fine.

[Mad-Matt]

I never thaught of the Monkey games as slow when I played them on my A600 all those years ago, not that I had anything else to compare them too at the time. Certainly no game breaking slow downs. They were running at light speed compared to Leasire suit larry I tried and failed to play at the time too .

Fate of Atlantis had its slowdown moments though. A section where you see an overhead view and dots representing the people and your trying to either run away or find someone (i cant remember) causing quite a bad slowdown. All in all though, I thuaught Amiga got good ports of the lucasarts games, Not the usual rush jobs we got.

[deicidal]

I seem to remember it was alright on the a500 back in the good old days, the only bit i remember been painfully slow was the rowing arround monkey island. Then again how the hell I had the patience to complete monkey island II and fate of atlantis on floppy I have no idea.