Rose

Tales of Monkey Island - a simple ultrawide and wider fix

Added 2022-09-20 22:22:04 +0000 UTC

In light of the release of Return to Monkey Island, I thought I'd have another look at Tales of Monkey Island, a Telltale game I had examined via Steam a few years ago.

That unsuccessful but not persistent attempt had been via Family Sharing, and now I no longer had the access, so today I got the game via GOG (where it's currently on sale - and it's probably not coincidental).

To my surprise, the solution that works on GOG couldn't be any simpler. You just find the 16:9 bytes (39 8E E3 3F) and replace all instances with your aspect ratio bytes. Then you select your resolution in the game and that's it.

If you're new to this, it can be done in a hex editor like HxD where you just have to open the exe (MonkeyIsland101.exe for example), search for and replace the bytes (make sure to switch from strings to the hexadecimal tab).

As before when I contributed to PhantomGamers' Telltale Patcher, I wanted it to be one stop for all Telltale games, but apparently the tool does not work for this one despite having the aspect ratio pattern. Phantom told me, and I think I'm seeing it in his code, that it first checks for another pattern that is more specific to Telltale, and it fails to move onto the usual aspect ratio bytes if not found.

Phantom is currently preoccupied, so until he can incorporate this trivial fix into the patcher, I'm just sharing the findings with you. Will this work for Steam? I'm not sure, but at least it works for something!

You can see it in the screenshots!

Update: PhantomGamers updated the patcher to make the same change possible.