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Issue's trying to get Secret of Monkey Island to work.

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First post, by maddmaxstar

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Hey there!
I'm having a few issues with trying to get the Secret of Monkey Island to run on my Am486DX4. The version that I have is on Floppy, and has both the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy sets.

I've tried installing the game using both sets of floppies. I had no issues during the install and disks read OK. When launching the game at first, it worked, but the sound was extremely distorted. (My Sound Card is a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, but it did the same thing when I swapped it for a SB16)

I tried running the game using the "MONKEY V A" command, but all that did was cause the game to crash saying "DIVIDE BY ZERO" with some numbers, and had to restart the machine.

I found a patch that is supposed to fix the sound and divide by zero issues (due to my use of a 486), located on the Lucasarts website.
http://www.lucasarts.com/support/update/monkey-1.html
I applied the patch as instructed, by replacing the games main EXE with the patched EXE. However, now when I run the game, all I get is "ILLEGAL BLOCK TYPE", and the game exits.

This is a fairly popular DOS game, has anyone run accross this issue in the past? Is there an alternative patch?

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 1 of 15, by Mau1wurf1977

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Go into BIOS and disable the L1 cache. Or hit the turbo button if you have one.

Your PC is simply a bit too fast for this game 😀

I can also recommend the special edition which is available on Steam. You can switch between old and new graphics. The music is also improved and I can highly recommend purchasing it!

Reply 2 of 15, by DonutKing

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Yep, disable cache. Or if your case has a turbo button, turn it off before starting the game 😀

I had the same problem even with a DX2-66.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 3 of 15, by maddmaxstar

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That trick worked. I had to remove the patched EXE and put the old EXE back in. The Turbo button didn't slow the machine down enough (I have the DX4-120 overclocked to 5x86-133 speeds) Disabling the L1 cache worked.

This issue would also explain why the game always worked fine on my Fiancee's childhood PC (this is her copy of the game), a Packard Bell 486sx-25 I think, not fast enough to cause the issue maybe.

As for the Special Editions, I think we have Monkey Island 2 SE on the 360, might have the first as well. I was hoping to keep authenticity with the 486. I guess it's another game that it runs too fast, like Stellar7.

What's weird though, is that Lucasarts (and other sites with seemingly the same patch) calls this patched EXE file the "486 Patch", which almost seemingly implys it would fix the fast machine issue. Instead it renders the game inoperable. Maybe it's for a newer floppy version of the game. Has anyone else tried this patch?

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 4 of 15, by Great Hierophant

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Do you have the 16-color or the 256-color version installed? Patch only works on 256-color version. You could try the game with the PC Speaker option for sound to see whether it is a true speed issue or a speed + sound card issue. Sierra's games of the same period tend to do the same thing with the Sound Blaster option and a fast 486 or higher.

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/ - Nerdly Pleasures - My Retro Gaming, Computing & Tech Blog

Reply 5 of 15, by maddmaxstar

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Great Hierophant wrote:

Do you have the 16-color or the 256-color version installed? Patch only works on 256-color version. You could try the game with the PC Speaker option for sound to see whether it is a true speed issue or a speed + sound card issue. Sierra's games of the same period tend to do the same thing with the Sound Blaster option and a fast 486 or higher.

Yeah, that would be it then, It's the 16 colour version, says so right on the box (and easy to tell from the Graphics).

As for the PC Speaker trick, that worked with the Cache enabled. So it's definitely the too fast issue. Looks like I'm stuck with the 16 colour version on slower settings or use the 386.

Thanks everyone for the help!

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 6 of 15, by DonutKing

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Here's a command line utility to disable and enable the cache so you can script it in a batch file instead of restarting the machine 😀
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=74

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 7 of 15, by maddmaxstar

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Thanks! And the readme file also mentions Stellar 7 by name - and I've also been having issues with Wing Commander running as well. Hope this'll fix it!

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 8 of 15, by maddmaxstar

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486 didn't like it... wonder if it's for Intel only chips...

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 9 of 15, by sliderider

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Go into BIOS and disable the L1 cache. Or hit the turbo button if you have one.

Your PC is simply a bit too fast for this game 😀

I can also recommend the special edition which is available on Steam. You can switch between old and new graphics. The music is also improved and I can highly recommend purchasing it!

How does he download the Steam version from a 486? 🤣

Reply 11 of 15, by Jolaes76

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Overclocks like hell, puts it under nitrogen and writes his own 486 optimized Steam client 😲 😲

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 12 of 15, by MCGA

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Does anyone have the 486 patch they could share, or know where I can still find it online?

The site is down now that Disney has eaten Lucas Arts.
<Deadlink>www.lucasarts.com/support/update/monkey ... </Deadlink>

The links is also out of date on the Vogonswiki page:
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_C … sensitive_games

OK, I found where Disney moved the patches if anyone else is interested: 😀
http://help.disney.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/Lis … s?section=Games

Reply 13 of 15, by skitters

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MCGA wrote:

OK, I found where Disney moved the patches if anyone else is interested: 😀
http://help.disney.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/Lis … s?section=Games

That was nice of them to make the individual patches available.

I remember downloading a huge collection of patches from the Web Archive just to get patches for 3 adventure games.
https://archive.org/download/ftp.lucasarts.com-20130427

The ftp.lucasarts.com-20130427.tar file was 2.5 GB in size and the Web Archive download was not fast.

I guess I'm slow to find this out though, since the thread where I found the link has been updated with the Disney links

I still use the descriptions of the patches available at the Web Archive though.

Reply 14 of 15, by Stiletto

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skitters wrote:

I remember downloading a huge collection of patches from the Web Archive just to get patches for 3 adventure games.
https://archive.org/download/ftp.lucasarts.com-20130427

For future reference, you can put a slash ("/") at the end of any compressed file URL on archive.org to get an "extracted view", which isn't a widely advertised feature of archive.org file uploads.

Ex: The 2.5GB tar file: https://archive.org/download/ftp.lucasarts.co … om-20130427.tar
Well, put a slash at the end of the URL: https://archive.org/download/ftp.lucasarts.co … m-20130427.tar/
now redirects to:
https://ia801703.us.archive.org/tarview.php?t … om-20130427.tar
and then you can download individual files from within that, such as Tiesnd.exe:
http://archive.org/download/ftp.lucasarts.com … pc%2FTiesnd.exe

You can also download individual files from any archive.org file uploads for which torrents are available by restricting your Bittorrent client to download specific files within the torrent.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 15 of 15, by MCGA

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Thanks for the links! Lots to work with now! 😀

And the command line utility linked in this thread is very useful and works great!

The Monkey.exe file I got from the tar directory is corrupted, but now that I have a better idea of what I needed to find, I found a working file in this thread:
Monkey Island 1&2: Roland MT-32 + Sound Blaster support

If only I had a clue last night, I would have gone to that thread first. It fixes the L1 issue and another issue where my keyboard was repeating "////..." at the copy protection screen. 😀

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