I imagine that for the price of a slot1->ppro adapter you can get a whole p1 system 🤣

Heh, true. I'll have to wait and see what comes up on eBay and for how much. For now though, from my testing on 86Box, the game plays fine with a Pentium II 266MHz. So I've bought one dirt-cheap off eBay. So fingers crossed!

Well, it looks as though my ISA Yamaha card is buggered now. I was having weird issues with it yesterday and I'm greeted with a BSOD if I insert it. I noticed one of the capacitors looks fried, too. So I'm now in the market for a replacement ISA card. Hopefully Monkey 1 and 2 will fare better with a Sound Blaster ISA card, like the AWE 64. Also, I should be getting my Pentium 2 tomorrow. 😀

Just like I suspected... Got my Pentium II today, installed it, all working fine. Load the game - same issue. 🤣

So it's not the CPU. Also tried replacing my autoexec and config files with basic test ones that load the bare minimum. Same issue. Even tried disabling UMBs and the mouse driver. I'm totally out of ideas. Only other thing left to try, but it'll be futile, is to re-create all the files again.

Recorded a video of the issue:

https://streamable.com/3jmwz6

Unfortunately, I don't know what the best place is to upload a video (apart from YouTube, which isn't always worth doing for short clips). Vimeo wants ID and my camera can't take a decent quality pic to satisfy it. >_>

Youtube is almost always the easiest option, not sure what you mean by not worth it for short clips

Realistically it all comes back to the sound device - The yamaha has issues and the SB16 software emulation will never be fully DOS compatible. Hardware SB16 devices (SB16, AWE32, AWE64) can also have issues with adventure games and MIDI slowdown. It seems maybe your best option is to get a replacement for the YMF card - Maybe an ESS or CMI ISA card.

But as with all things there's also no guarantees since the root cause hasn't been identified

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-19, 22:38:

Youtube is almost always the easiest option, not sure what you mean by not worth it for short clips

Realistically it all comes back to the sound device - The yamaha has issues and the SB16 software emulation will never be fully DOS compatible. Hardware SB16 devices (SB16, AWE32, AWE64) can also have issues with adventure games and MIDI slowdown. It seems maybe your best option is to get a replacement for the YMF card - Maybe an ESS or CMI ISA card.

But as with all things there's also no guarantees since the root cause hasn't been identified

I guess I've just been spoilt by quick file hosting for quickly dropping images and GIFs into chats.

Hmm. It's puzzling. Just like one of Monkey Island's. But it's true that the SB16 is only emulated, not a true SB16. What about a SB Pro 2? I'm quite tempted to get one of those instead. I might have to get an assortment.

A whole week later… Was feeling incredibly depressed and lacked motivation earlier on. But I’ve been cheered up. I fixed it! It’s working properly! No stuck animation! 😃

But it’s weird. Just yesterday, I tried using SETYMF instead of UNISOUND and I was still having the same problem. Play around with it today, and God only knows what I did differently, but the speech plays correctly. And with the Yamaha card! 😦 So I get general MIDI from the sound canvas, speech, AND the intro/animations play correctly! \o/

The only issue I have now is the game randomly locking up. Audio plays, but I can’t move the mouse. That could be down to being in EMS mode though (I think) or that I just need to disable the L2 cache. But it’s bloody great progress though!

Hmm. Confusing. So I get the same issue in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis where it will randomly pause. Can move the mouse cursor, but nothing can be interacted with. And any music playing gets stuck in a loop. The issue triggers whenever I try to open the door to the SCUMM Bar. Normally, a sound effect plays when you do, but I get nothing and then it pauses. It's weird because surely if speech is working fine, SFX should be too...?

I've tried loading up HIMEM and disabling the L2 cache, but neither have helped.

Disabled all memory managers so it's default DOS, loaded up CuteMouse 1.9 from 2.1 and when I opened the door this time a load of random code shows above.

Alright...! After trying what I was doing with Fate of Atlantis - using CuteMouse 2.0a and CPUSPD set to various options - nothing was working and I was still getting that crash outside the SCUMM Bar. I ended up making one slight adjustment within SETYMF and the next time I tried, it actually displayed the error, which gave me a big clue.

I've been keeping the Wikipedia page of CPU sensitive games tab open and I'm bloody glad I did. Scrolled down to Monkey Island 1 and right there, staring at me:

I need to install the update. A bit strange though as I would've thought the version from the Special Edition would have been updated to the latest. Won't try it now, so I'll do it tomorrow. Fingers crossed that solves the issue. I hope!

I'm not sure the patches mentioned are for the CDROM version, they should be for the floppy version.

carlostex wrote on 2026-01-22, 11:02:

I'm not sure the patches mentioned are for the CDROM version, they should be for the floppy version.

Ah. If that's the case then I'm not sure how I'm going to get around this particular issue. 🙁

Yep. Screwed. As usual. Only for the floppy disk version. Haven't tried it though as the description for the patch says it's only for the 256 VGA version and advises not to install it otherwise. Also tried disabling the L2 cache using SetMul, which has been recommended for getting around that particular error. No change. I can't even load the game to see if it happens if I have no sound card installed. 🙁

I'm more or less out of ideas. Unisound and the Yamaha don't play nicely with it, SETYMF does up until this lockup with the SCUMM Bar, so the only thing left I can try is loading the DOS drivers for the Yamaha and see what happens.

Success! I've fixed it! 😀 😁

It was a good call for me to install the DOS drivers for my sound card! It set everything up correctly by default. And it helped me isolate the root cause.

Initially, I tried playing the game on my test rig, but still had the same issue. Getting the Pentium II was definitely a smart choice. I used my first Pentium III 450Mhz, which caused the game to lock up before speech could play. Switching to the Pentium II fixes that, so that's definitely a CPU issue.

But the crashing outside the SCUMM Bar - the games look to use WSS as well as the Sound Blaster and General MIDI. When the door to the SCUMM Bar is opened, it should play a sound effect before entering. Prior to the crash, nothing plays. I was only getting music and speech. It looks as though sound effects are done with the Windows Sound System audio. Unisound doesn't give any manual options, I don't think. Volumes are controlled with command switches, but I'm not sure if channels/resources can be set...? SETYMF does, thankfully. And the main channel for WSS was set wrong. It was set to A20 for some reason. It needed to be 530h. And its own IRQ and DMA need to be set right. The default DOS drivers did that, too. They were set to 5 and 0 respectively. SETYMF doesn't list IRQ and DMA directly under WSS so that leaves IRQ B and DMA B. So I set WSS from A to B and then IRQ B was set to 7 (as 5 was taken) and DMA B was set to 0. Everything appears to be working correctly. 😁

There's still a chance it could crash, which will probably be resolved by disabling the L2 cache. Will have to play through the game some for testing. As well as testing Monkey Island 2 Talkie.

Time to write some notes for future reference. 😀

Also, I noticed my Pentium II gets quite hot. Will need to take the fan off one of my Pentium IIIs.

I find that very weird. I'll probably take a look into disassembling the EXE, it doesn't make sense to me using WSS for sound effects. Sounds more and more like a DMA conflict.

Hmm. It's possible. Although when I went to set things up on my main rig, putting things to the same values didn't achieve anything. Using SETYMF, and pressing W for the WSS sound test never fired the IRQ. It would only allow me to use the SB Pro or WSS. Never both. Even though the tone played, no IRQ fired. And testing the game caused it to crash in the same place. Installed the OPL3's DOS drivers, which always sets the IRQ to 5 for the SB Pro, WSS, and the MPU-401, the game works perfectly.

carlostex wrote on 2026-01-22, 20:58:

I find that very weird. I'll probably take a look into disassembling the EXE, it doesn't make sense to me using WSS for sound effects. Sounds more and more like a DMA conflict.

I'm in agreement, I very much doubt the game is swapping digital fx drivers in real time - I don't think it has that capability at all. Seems much more likely that setting up WSS shifted around some resources or put the card into a more compatible mode

I'm happy to be proven wrong. To learn from the experience. I'm interested in what carlostex finds by disassembling the EXE.

I am very puzzled though how I'm not able to set up the SB Pro and WSS in SETYMF when I could on my test rig. Why the configuration and shared IRQs with the DOS tool allows me to play the game flawlessly, but if I load up SETYMF right afterwards, or first, I get the crashing issue. And how/why WSS' sound test doesn't fire the IRQ. And I tried different configurations with A and B and mixed and matched IRQs and DMAs, too.

I did notice that no music played from my sound canvas in Monkey Island 2. General MIDI or emulated MT-32. I believe I tried the R and R1 switches, too. I've not delved deeply into it yet. I imagine they use the same switches as the first game...? I can't imagine it needs an additional patch, right?

The switches are slightly different, although r by itself should send MIDI data to port 330 just like the first game. The differences are that r1/r2/r3/r4 got changed to r330/r332/r334/r336