Monkey Island Explorer – Updated Annotations

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.

A blast from the past – EMI Background Viewer

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.

EMI Background Viewer

Telltale Speech Extractor 1.3

Two years after the last version I’m finally releasing a new Telltale Speech Extractor.

Version 1.3 has had the backend completely re-written and there have been many changes. See the readme for the full list, but here are the most important ones:

  • It now supports all currently available Telltale Games and supports every version of every game right back to the original versions released in 2005.
  • Every known bug has been fixed – so all speech should dump perfectly and glitch-free.
  • There are full annotations for every game – so you can quickly find the particular line of speech that you want.

Download it here.

[Edit] As with Telltale Music Extractor the program includes 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 the program safe in the knowledge that it is virus-free.

Monkey Island Explorer 0.4 – Adds Audio Dumping and Annotations

Monkey Island Explorer 0.4 is now available. This version adds support for playing and dumping the audio from both games (music, voice and sfx) and introduces annotation support (this allows for more descriptive filenames in the audio).

Since this is the first non-beta release of the program I should describe what it does. As the name suggests, its an explorer tool for Monkey Island 1 Special Edition and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition.
It does the following:

  • Lets you browse through the game’s files and dump individual files/all files.
  • Lets you play and dump the audio (music, speech and sfx).
  • Displays the images as you browse and lets you save them as PNG’s or DDS files (for editing)
  • Displays the txt, fx and csv text as you browse through the files.
  • Together with my Monkey Island Image Converter it forms part of a toolset that enables you to edit the images and put them back into the games (eg to create the much talked about ‘hair patch’).

Download it here.

A new tool – Monkey Island Image Converter

Its easy to view and edit the images in the Monkey Island Special Edition games using Monkey Island Explorer. But if you want to put the edited images back into the games you need to convert the images back into a format that the games understand. That’s why I’ve created the Monkey Island Image Converter.

It allows you to convert .DDS images back into the .DXT format used in Monkey Island 1 Special Edition and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition.

Usage is simple – its just drag and drop and if you drop a folder it’ll search subfolders too.

Download it here.

Telltale Music Extractor 1.4.6 – With Soundtrack Support

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated, adding in soundtrack support.

This feature enables certain games to be dumped as a soundtrack. Doing this brings many benefits: the tracks will have more descriptive names, will be tagged with artist/album/track information and will have album art.

The idea for soundtrack support came from the excellent Laserschwert and you can read about the development of the feature here. Thanks to his hard work, this release comes with soundtrack support for all episodes of Tales of Monkey island.

Soundtrack support is controlled through a simple ini file, so people can easily add soundtrack support for other games, see the readme or forum thead for more information about this. If you make a soundtrack ini file for a game please send it to me so I can include it in the next release of the program.

If you like this new feature, remember to thank Laserschwert – the idea was his and he’s done a brilliant job making the soundtrack files.

Download it here.

USB Disk Eject 1.2 Beta 4 – Last Beta Before Release (Hopefully)

[Edit – Beta 5 is now released – see here]

After a huge amount of work, I’m now releasing Beta 4 of USB Disk Ejector. There are many changes since the last beta and barring any show-stopping bugs this version should become the final release.

I would be extremely grateful if people could test this and report their experiences in the comments below.

Please read this first:

This beta is considered fully-functional – i.e. everything should work. There have been many changes since the last beta, but here are the main ones:

  • Command line switches have been fixed and changed. Some have been added and some removed. Available command line switches are:
  • /? – shows all command line switches
  • /NOSAVE – Any changes made to options are not saved, no cfg file will be created. But if theres USB_Disk_Eject.cfg in the path then options will be read from it. Useful in situations where the app is running from a read only location and wont be able to save its changes to a cfg file, or if you’re giving people controlled access to the app and don’t want them changing any options.
  • /REMOVETHIS – Ejects the drive that the program is running from. Eg if the program is run from a usb stick on drive G then drive G would be ejected.
  • /REMOVELABEL – Ejects the drive with the specified label. Partial label matching is possible if a wildcard (*) is used. Eg /REMOVELABEL *BEN would eject a drive that had Ben in its label (eg Ben’s Pen Drive).
  • /REMOVELETTER – Ejects the drive with the specified drive letter.
  • /REMOVEMOUNTPOINT – Ejects the drive with the specified mountpoint.
  • /REMOVENAME – Ejects the drive with the specified name. Partial name matching is possible if a wildcard (*) is used. Eg /REMOVENAME *SANDISK would eject a drive that had Sandisk in its name.
  • Rewritten options dialog – should be much clearer.
  • Docking option – to keep app snapped to a corner of the screen.
  • Improved communication – the app uses balloon hints to communicate with the user by default. However if balloonhints arent available it will use a messagebox instead – the messagebox will automatically close after 5 seconds.
  • Audio notification option – to allow sounds indicating a successful or failed ejection.
  • Hotkeys now work correctly and more hotkey actions such as ejecting by drive label and mountpoint are available.

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 may be broken. I’ve tried my best to ensure that the new features support Windows 2000 but this may not be the case. I don’t have 2000 to be able to test this.

[Edit] I’ve updated the download with a new build that wont show most card readers. If you downloaded the app before this message appeared please redownload it.

[Edit – Beta 5 is now released – see here]