Its been a long time since the last beta release and today I’m finally releasing beta 5.  Please see the last beta post for the full list of changes since the last stable version.

Changes:

This version has some minor tweaks behind the scenes but the main change is a bugfix that *should* should stop the freezes that some people were getting when ejecting. However its possible that the changes could have the opposite effect and it might stop disks ejecting for some. Its fine for me but I need people to test this on different versions of Windows.

Please read this first:

This beta is considered fully-functional – i.e. most things should work. See the last beta post for the full list of changes. Please give me feedback in the comments but please try to be specific and give me as much information as possible such as Windows version, what you’re trying to eject etc.

Things that wont work in this beta:

Card reader support is disabled. Ejecting a card reader will eject the device not the card in this beta. I’ll be looking into card reader support again once I’ve got the next stable release done.

Windows 2000 support is broken. I’ve tried my best to ensure that the new features support Windows 2000 but I don’t think it’ll work. I don’t have 2000 to be able to test this.

Link removed – there’s now a newer stable release.

The word on the street is that the new retail dvd release of Monkey Island 1+2 Special Edition includes the full high quality soundtrack. Regular visitors will know that my Monkey Island Explorer tool already lets you extract the music (and much more) from the games.

However, the soundtrack in the retail version is stored slightly differently and so needs a new tool. Today I’m releasing Monkey Island Music Extractor – point it to the launcher.pak file and it’ll extract the ogg files within.

Download it here.

[Edit] I’ve now updated the program to support tagging – all ogg files are now automatically tagged. Many thanks to Laserschwert for providing the tags.

It was recently pointed out to me that the last version of Monkey Island Explorer didn’t work correctly with the XBox versions of the games.

The culprit was a tiny bug…that took an hour to find and fix. It’s now finally sorted and the XBox versions should work fine again.

Download the new version here.

Yet again, Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor have been updated. They now include support for Back To The Future 105 – Outa Time.

Download them here.

Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor have both been updated. I’ve added support for Hector 101 – We Negotiate with Terrorists and Back To The Future 104 – Double Visions.

Download them here.

Apologies for the post title. As requested, Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor have both been updated to support Back To The Future 103: Citizen Brown.

The summary.

After 5 years I’m releasing a new version of Telltale Explorer. During that time I’ve continued to develop the program and have used it as a development tool and template for my other programs.

It’s completely different to the last public release – the interface has changed, many more games are supported and it can now extract/view/convert all the common resources types (text, images, speech, music). If you are looking to dump music or voices you should still use the Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor programs as they are specialised for the job.

There are some important caveats to this version that you can read about below.

Why have I released this now?

This is the first public release of Telltale Explorer since 2006 – 5 years ago. During that time I didn’t release any new versions as it was suggested that having a program like this floating around would harm Telltale. Since then though, other people have released programs that open, extract, translate and even recompile ttarch files (telltale archives). The rationale for not releasing this program therefore has gone.

I still have no wish to cause Telltale any inconvenience or problems though – so there are some safeguards written into this program.

1. It only supports games that are at least a year old. This is to help prevent any possible complaints by Telltale’s licence partners and to stop people poking inside the datafiles of ongoing episodes and spoiling game-based competitions like the TMI one.
2. Game launcher ttarch files cant be opened and any launcher files (html/css) inside regular ttarch’s are hidden. These files are only used for the launcher program and there’s no reason for anyone to mess with these. They don’t affect the games at all.

Where can I get it?

Download it here.

Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor have both been updated to support Back To The Future 101: It’s About Time.

Download them here.

Its almost Christmas, which means its time for MixnMojo’s end of year polls. One poll is of particular interest – the “best hosted site” poll. As I write this Quick and Easy Software is in second place.

If you’ve ever used any of the software on this site you are morally bound to buy me a drink if you ever meet me, or failing that – vote for this site in the Mojo poll.

Go vote. You know you want to.

Today I’ve released new versions of Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor.

Both programs now support Poker Night At The Inventory and CSI Fatal Conspiracy. The Speech Extractor also adds support for Sam and Max 305 – The City That Dares Not Sleep.

As I’ve said before – both programs include a file called libtag.dll some antivirus programs have detected this as a virus in the past. This is a false positive, you can use them safe in the knowledge that they are virus-free.

Download them here.

I’ve just uploaded a new version of the Monkey Island Image Converter.

This release fixes a bug with non-square images, these were being converted incorrectly.

Download it here.

Another update for Telltale Music Extractor. Version 1.4.8.5 adds support for Sam and Max 305 – The City That Dares Not Sleep.

Download it here.

Thanks to the efforts of Scott Talley, Monkey Island Explorer has been updated again.

This time the program hasn’t been updated – but the annotations have. Scott’s been hard at work fixing and updating the annotations to work with the latest patch for MI2 SE. The annotations provide friendlier names for the music, commentary and speech.

Download it here.

It was recently brought to my attention that EMI Background Viewer didn’t work correctly on Vista or Windows 7 – the images weren’t displayed.

Its one of the least popular programs on this site so that’s probably why the bug went undetected for so long. For those unfamiliar with the program it does exactly as you would expect and enables you to view and save the room backgrounds from Monkey Island 4. It supports the PC and PS2 versions and has a “debug mode” to let you see the masking information in the backgrounds.

Its one of my oldest programs and was last updated in 2004. It was used to extract the EMI concept art from the PS2 version and to find the “Randy sucks” easter egg (turn on debug mode and its in one of the SCUMM Bar images).

I’ve now given it a facelift, a speed-up, fixed the bugs and made it even easier to use. See the readme for the full list of changes.

Download it here.