Making the curse of monkey island run on a modern system

In case anyone is curious, the tricks to making the LucasArts game ‘The Curse Of Monkey Island’ run on a modern (SMP) system without constant crashes and sound issues are as follows:

1) In the control panel, under sounds and audio devices /  audio tab / sound playback / advanced / performance, set hardware acceleration to ‘basic only’

2) Monkey island has a launcher – it’s the autorun application for the cd. Once the launcher is running (either via autorun or via running monkey.exe off the cd), open the task manager (control-alt-delete), find the application in the list, right click and choose ‘go to process’. Then, right click on the process, choose ‘set affinity’, and uncheck all but CPU 0.

3) Now, go back to the launcher and click ‘launch monkey island’. Because the process is invoked by a process with a affinity mask, the game process will also have one and will therefore work correctly.

This trick may work on many games which otherwise have audio problems on SMP/dual core/quad core/multiprocessor systems. I apologize if everyone in the world but me already knew this. 😉

5 Responses to “Making the curse of monkey island run on a modern system”

  1. curious Says:

    Have you not heard of ScummVM?!?
    http://www.scummvm.org/
    You can play your monkey island series on just about anything there are installers for all of the below platforms and source is available!

    Windows Installer (2.2M Win32 .exe)
    Windows zipfile (2.9M zipfile)
    Fedora 7 package (2.8M RPM)
    Fedora Core 5 and 6 package (2.8M RPM)
    Debian 4.0 (etch) package (1.9M .deb)
    SlackWare package (2.8M .tgz)
    Mac OS X Universal Disk Image (5.6M disk image)
    PSP (PlayStation Portable) package (6.2M .zip)
    Nintendo DS package 0.10.0a (6.7M .zip)
    Symbian S60 version 3 binary (2.6M .sis)
    Symbian UIQ 3 binary (2.6M .sis)
    PalmOS 5 binary (6.4M zipfile)
    PalmOS Tapwave Zodiac binary (7.0M zipfile)
    Windows CE ARM package (4.0M zipfile)
    Opie SDL package Only for iPAQ h1910/h1915 and MyPal 716 (3.1M .ipk)
    Dreamcast plain files (4.2M .tar.bz2)
    Dreamcast Nero Image & Demos (8.3M .zip)
    GP2X package (3.3M .zip)
    Solaris 8 and up (Sparc) binary (3.4M .tar.bz2)
    Solaris 10 (both IA32 and AMD64) binary (9.0M .pkg.bz2)
    BeOS package (3.3M pkg)
    AmigaOS 4 package (3.9M .lha)
    Atari/FreeMiNT package (68020 and up) (2.7M .zip)
    OS/2 package (3.0M .zip)

  2. sheer_panic Says:

    Actually, I’d heard of it – it came up when I was looking for details on the latest version of a fixed-point ogg audio decoder. I just thought it would be more painless to use the original installer. The jury is still out – but I will be playing with ScummVM, because I’ve decided I want to play DOTT and Monkey Island 2,

  3. Old Games Database Says:

    Thank you very much, curious, your solution worked!

  4. Sue Kayton Says:

    Thanks! It fixed it. Now my kids can enjoy the game, too.

  5. Stuart Roberts Says:

    Hey, I had tried all sorts of stuff to get Curseof Monkey Island to work with XP, but to no avail. I’d tried SCUMMVM and SCUMM Quick & Easy, and a different launcher. I could either get good sound but was unable to save games, or i couild save but the sound kept looping.

    Anyway,I found this page through Google and your method worked a treat for me – thanks so much!

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