Adding voice to the original DOS versions of Monkey Island 1 and 2

Hello everyone! 

Being a big fan of the LucasFilm (then LucasArts) point and click games from the late 80s / early 90s, I wanted to try playing these games in one of my vintage computers.

I recently installed the latest PowerPC version (v2.1.2) of ScummVM on my PowerBook G4 12" and it ran great! It was fun to re-visit a few LucasArts games of my childhood running well on the vintage, small form factor, and sturdy aluminum Apple laptop from 2004. I feel the trackpad in this PowerBook is very responsive and a perfect fit for a point-and-click adventure game.

I've played a bit of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (The Graphic Adventure), of course I wanted to try the the Special Editions released in 2009 and 2010 of Monkey Island 1 and 2. I needed to try the original DOS versions of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: Le Chuck's Revenge to see them running on the PowerPC / MacOS.

 

While I was researching about these games, I came across some links saying that there was a way to mod the original DOS games to add the speech dialogues from the Special Editions (SE) on them. All you need are a few batch files, the original SE games and of course, ScummVM and the original DOS games. 

I jumped into this rabbit hole and I'm sharing how I made it work.

Here is the website from a bright German fellow called Marek Roth (thank you for the excellent work!) with the batches and detailed instructions on how to extract the SE audio for both games: 

http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey1.html

http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey2.html

Basically, what you will need to prepare this talkie patch version is:

1) Special Edition PC version of the games installed

2) Talkie Edition batches extractor for each game: MI1 Ultimate Talkie Edition 1.02.zip /  MI2 Ultimate Talkie Edition 0.2.zip

3) xWMAEncode.exe from Microsoft's DirectX sdk.

4) Approximately 1.3 GB temporary disk space, 194 MB for DOS, 825 MB for FLAC and 168 MB for Ogg Vorbis version.

5) Windows XP or later. 

6) A device able to run SCUMM V5 games.

Instructions (the same apply for MI2):

- Extract the zip with batch files and put the MI1_Ultimate_Talkie_Edition_Builder folder where you have Monkey1.pak installed.
- Put the xWMAEncode.exe (downloaded on item 3 above) and put it inside the tools subfolder.
- Run install_flac.bat for highest quality audio and wait for the MI1 Ultimate Talkie Edition to be created. Alternatively run install_ogg.bat to get a smaller, but data reduced monkey.sog instead of monkey.sof. I recommend the later if you plan to run the ScummVM engine in retro systems.
- Optional: if you prefer having the SE's extended environment tracks in the main game folder, so they will play in every music mode, run extended_SE_tracks_to_game_folder.bat
- If you get a MSVCR100.DLL error while the batch is running, make sure you have the Visual C++ library installed before running the batch. Download and matching 64bit or 32bit (x86) version depending if your Windows was installed in 64 or 32 bits mode (how to check which Windows version you have). 

- Once the batch file completes the audio extraction (it will take about 5-10 minutes depending on your system), copy all the content of the recently created subfolder called "MI1_Ultimate_Talkie_Edition" into the your original DOS game folder. (I recommend creating a backup as this will overwrite the original silent version of the game)

- Now, open ScummVM (in my case in the PowerBook) and add the game and choose the version you would like to play!

Hope you enjoy these classics with the original graphics on your retro device with added voice acting for the first time!