VOGONS

About Sam and Max CD-ROM version... again

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First post, by ludicrous_peridot

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I know Sam and Max talkie issues with sound have been raised a few times already and the game is considered somewhat speed sensitive. And I actually have an ISA system that is capable of running it (and am aware of the semi-official interpreter version that allows running original game in Windows 9x). But the desire to also have it on my i5 FreeDOS laptop made me revisit the game again and I want to share my experience with it.

On modern systems I have been getting crashes every time sound effects were enabled in setup. I tried different versions of SCUMM that come with the game and its demos, and every 7. version, where they seem to have made a switch to protected mode, behaved like that. I noticed, however that SCUMM version prior to v7 that were still real mode actually worked. So as an experiment I tried running full CD version using interpreter that describes itself as "6.5.0 (Nov 17 1993 14:32:10)" found with one of the demos for the game. It worked, even though it did not seem to be 100% compatible with the assets, the only obvious issue being wrong sampling frequency used for sound effects. So, without looking into the root cause, I have patched sound drivers to prefer 22k regardless of the actual initialization parameter game used, and that did the trick.

So I can start the game, watch the intro, walk around, travel around world map, race in the highway, speech is heard, saving and loading works, and while there is no sound setup in game menu, I can use the Ctrl+M, Ctrl+T, [, ], ,, ., +, - keys to achive the same result. All that with VSBHDA and no slowdown tools.

I couldn't be happier, if only not for an error message I am getting at the very beginning of the game once. It complains about "unplayable" heap state and reports 370k free memory. After I dismiss it all goes well (as described above).

So since there are quite a few expers on SCUMM on the boards, what's your opinion? Is it possible to finish the talkie in the realmode Interpreter version? Was this perhaps tried before? And what's the significance of the heap warning?..

Oh, and one more question: does the game use CD audio tracks in-game, or are those given as a bonus to listen in the launcher? I never played the CD-version in the past so curious if DOS machine without a CD drive is in fact feasible for a playthrough... which I am contemplating now.

GA-G41M-Combo G41/ICH7 - Core 2 Quad Q9550 - DDR3 1033 - Radeon RX570 - CMI-8738 - X3MB (Buran)
Beetle/M/i815+ICH2 - Celeron 566Mhz - Opti 924
https://archive.org/details/peridot-26

Reply 1 of 3, by DevanWolf

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ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2026-02-02, 13:09:

On modern systems I have been getting crashes every time sound effects were enabled in setup. I tried different versions of SCUMM that come with the game and its demos, and every 7. version, where they seem to have made a switch to protected mode, behaved like that. I noticed, however that SCUMM version prior to v7 that were still real mode actually worked. So as an experiment I tried running full CD version using interpreter that describes itself as "6.5.0 (Nov 17 1993 14:32:10)" found with one of the demos for the game. It worked, even though it did not seem to be 100% compatible with the assets, the only obvious issue being wrong sampling frequency used for sound effects. So, without looking into the root cause, I have patched sound drivers to prefer 22k regardless of the actual initialization parameter game used, and that did the trick.

Use ScummVM, not NTVDM.

Reply 2 of 3, by SScorpio

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ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2026-02-02, 13:09:

Oh, and one more question: does the game use CD audio tracks in-game, or are those given as a bonus to listen in the launcher? I never played the CD-version in the past so curious if DOS machine without a CD drive is in fact feasible for a playthrough... which I am contemplating now.

No, like other Lucasarts games of that era is has a single very large MONSTER.SOU file that contains the speech. You can copy that to a HDD and play without a CD.

Reply 3 of 3, by ludicrous_peridot

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Thanks, and that's exactly how I was using CD assets with that demo version that I have mentioned.
On the CD that I have, however, there are "red book" audio tracks as well, which one can listen to from this launcher program.

The attachment sam.png is no longer available

I was curious if playback of those only bonus (like with C&C mission disk), or is also part of the gameplay experience (remember Final Fantasy VIII 😉 ).

On the error message, this seems to be coming from the game script itself.
Trying to wrap my head around this at the moment, but it looks like a diagnostic message one is getting when "available memory" is less than a certain threshold. Seems like it - the diagnostic message and method behind it - was not exactly built for the real mode version of the interpreter, which seems to output free DOS memory, which I can hardly believe is the actual heap size available to the game.

E: ... and I ended up suppressing the useless message by patching SCUMM script file, following the lead above.
So I wonder now, how long it is going to take me to the point where the game crashes 😁

GA-G41M-Combo G41/ICH7 - Core 2 Quad Q9550 - DDR3 1033 - Radeon RX570 - CMI-8738 - X3MB (Buran)
Beetle/M/i815+ICH2 - Celeron 566Mhz - Opti 924
https://archive.org/details/peridot-26

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