Monkey Island: Why Not HGR?

Why an Apple II+?

In my projects I like to target a 48k Apple II+ from 1979. Why?

I own one and like to run my software on it
I like the challenge
I like that it's more or less a 6502 and a lot of 7400 series logic. Later Apple II graphics modes (DGR, DHR, SHR) and graphics on other systems (such as the C64 and Atari) require custom ASIC chips

Well, why not HGR? The II+ can do HGR.

There are various reasons not to use HGR.

It takes 8x as much RAM as lo-res (8k vs 1k). That might not sound like much but on a 48k system that's a big chunk of RAM, and it doubles if you are using page flipping.
A game like Monkey Island was big, the DOS version took 8 360k floppies. That would be 20 140k Apple II floppies. Using HGR mode would in theory take 8x as many disks as a lo-res version.
There's also the speed issue. Clearing 8k of RAM takes a while. You can't clear a HGR screen in a single 60Hz frame. This is why many HGR games run at lower framerate, or else have boring black backgrounds.
Programming HGR graphics is a huge pain. In addition to weird memory interleave, there are all the weird color-clash issues. So while you have 6 colors in theory, getting them next to each other can be complex.
It's hard to have fast sprites. Usually people resort to large precomputed sprites and sprite compilers. That's complex and takes a lot of RAM which is in short supply on a II+.

Weren't there SCUMM games for Apple II?

Yes, games like Zach McKracken and Maniac Mansion. If you check though they only ran on IIe/IIc with at least 128k of RAM. Programming for a machine with 128k of RAM is a whole different exercise than programming for one with 48k.

Won't the graphics look a lot better with HGR?

Not necessarily. In any case you'd have to hand draw them because auto-conversion isn't really up to the task. I'll include some examples below.

HGR and DHGR graphics examples

Some examples showing the difficulties going to higher resolution. These were auto-converted with Bill Buckels' bmp2hdr utility from the VGA version of the game.

You'd probably argue these would be a lot better if someone manually touched them up. This is true, but making good-looking HGR graphics is a very difficult and obscure skillset.

Yes I know my Scumm Bar example is not an exact match, I don't have the actual one in the demo yet.

My hand-updated lores (40x48, 15 color) Versions (1k)

Auto-converted HGR (140x192, 6 color) Versions (8k)

Auto-converted Double-HGR [needs Apple IIe/IIc/IIgs w/ 128k RAM] (140x192, 15 color) Versions (16k)

Conversion of EGA and CGA graphics

You might also argue we should start with the CGA or EGA graphics for better results. Below is a quick example output for those:

HGR conversion of CGA graphics

HGR conversion of EGA graphics

HGR conversion of EGA graphics (dithered)

What about Double-Lores?

Double Lo-res is a pain to get going (possibly worse than double-hires). I don't really have the tools for it either.

Autoconversion to this mode wouldn't really look great.

If you hand-drew a conversion, it would look better than lo-res. It would also be a lot of work.

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