Reply 160 of 165, by DivByZero
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I recently got a Reelmagic CD Lite card setup on my 486 for a single game - Return to Zork. This is a game I spent a lot of time as a kid playing, but originally more the Macintosh version than the PC version. My mother worked at a local school that had a bank of Macintosh PCs and about a dozen copies of this game. I'd play it after school sometimes, and we'd regularly take home one of the Macs during the school holidays. A few years later on I got the PC version, and was incredibly disappointed with it in comparison. The lack of almost any video content, and very low resolution screens by comparison, felt like a pale imitation. Today, I have the mac version (regular, not MPEG) running on a Quadra 650, and I've been comparing side by side with the regular DOS and Reelmagic PC versions running on my 486, and I've got to say, I think the standard Mac version is still the superior version. The Reelmagic PC version is basically the same game as the Macintosh version (the differences people usually note are normal on the Mac version), but with a few extra bugs (IE, blacksmith thinking you always have the rotten meat, some glitches on scene transitions). The PC version does make it possible to use MT-32 music, but the soundtrack for this game isn't exactly standout, and the Mac version uses sampled sound for everything which sounds pretty good, with a few extra sound effects not heard on any of the PC versions. The one variant I can't compare with is the Macintosh MPEG version (don't have the card), but I can't see how it could be any better. The game already had good looking full motion video all the way through it on the Mac without MPEG. The MPEG decoder hardware it was designed for only supports up to 320x240, and the video assets basically match the PC MPEG version, so I think there'd be a loss of quality.
I took some pictures on the same physical monitor running three versions of the game - Mac CD, PC CD, PC ReelMagic for comparisons. I haven't seen many pictures shared online of the Mac version, and it's not as easy to find and get running these days, so this might be a bit of an eye-opener for some people:
Macintosh version:
PC ReelMagic version:
PC CD version:
Macintosh version:
PC ReelMagic version:
PC CD version:
Macintosh version:
PC ReelMagic version:
PC CD version:
The Mac version wasn't a lazy port or secondary thought, they actually have some screens done differently to show off the area better than they could on the PC version, like this angle of the school, where you can read the sign on the Mac version. On the PC it would have just been a blur, so they decided to change it to show the door only:
Macintosh version:
PC CD version:
I think it'd be great to see an "Ultimate" version of RTZ one day, which combines the best elements from all the versions. I think the MPEG backgrounds to each scene should be dropped in favour of the high resolution images from the Mac version. The MPEG scene backgrounds don't add anything useful. They really don't make use of motion in a meaningful way (the game clearly didn't plan for it when it was done), they degrade the image quality, and lead to some transition problems. Ideally the entire thing could run under the MADE engine on a 486DX2 under dos, but with a 640x480 resolution. It'd be quite an undertaking, and probably one I'll never actually attempt, but the idea is nice. Until then, if anyone else is interested in Return to Zork, I'd personally recommend the Mac version (either on hardware or emulated) for the best experience, however on an actual 486 in DOS today, the ReelMagic version is without a doubt a major improvement to the regular CD version, even if it is imperfect. I may do a patch for the ReelMagic version at some point to fix the blacksmith bug, for my own amusement if nothing else, but I do think the Mac version is the best cut of this game as it stands.
