Monkey Island viewer puts all 13 versions of The Secret of Monkey Island side by side, with the right CRT for each

Pick two versions of Guybrush Threepwood’s first adventure and the viewer parks them next to each other, same scene, same framing, same 4 box. The only thing that changes is the machine. The “Drop here to set A” and “Drop here to set B” slots do the rest, and Swap flips them if you’re feeling indecisive.

The counts on the page say what you’re looking at: “8 editions · 13 modes · 12 scenes · 156 screens.” Do the multiplication and 13 modes times 12 scenes comes to exactly 156 screenshots, every one framed the same. That is the trick that makes this useful. Screenshots taken at different sizes leave you squinting at a Mac window next to a CGA frame, guessing which differences are the hardware and which are the cropping.

The machines on offer include PC in 16-color, EGA and CGA modes, Atari ST in monochrome and color, Mac, Amiga, Sega CD and FM Towns, plus a Hercules mode for the green-screen crowd. Most people only ever saw one of those. Now you can check the difference in two clicks.

The captures came from emulators, ScummVM and Hatari, and the page says which. “Every screen was captured in ScummVM, except the Atari ST monochrome screens, which come from the Hatari emulator.” Each one is 1600x1200 with nearest-neighbor scaling and 4 aspect correction, so the pixels stay square-edged instead of melting into blur. The PC 16-color screens come from a Spanish copy and the Atari ST monochrome ones from a French copy, which is a nice reminder that preservation is partly a matter of who kept their disks.

Then there is the CRT lab, which is the part I’d show a friend. The shader is a WebGL2 port of DOSBox Staging’s presets for Hyllian’s crt-hyllian shader, plus DOSBox Staging’s own VGA shaders for screens with few pixels, with curvature, corners and vignette borrowed from libretro’s crt-guest-advanced-hd. There is a 31/15 kHz monitor switch for the EGA and CGA captures, and monitor settings grouped by machine: PC and FM Towns, Mac, EGA/CGA, Amiga, ST and Sega CD, Hercules and ST mono. In plain words, the site pretends to be the right television for each computer, instead of one generic scanline filter for everything.

The credits read like a pub quiz answer sheet. MobyGames’s Amiga credits (Chris Hülsbeck, Rudolf Stember) are cited, the ASCII chart uses VileR’s IBM VGA 9x16 font from int10h.org, and there is a nod to Aaron Giles for the LucasArts Mac and Windows ports and to MacTech’s “Fast Blit Strategies.” That last one is somebody reading 1990s Mac programming articles for fun, and I respect it.

The makers are The Paninos off-line, two brothers who say they are also remaking Sierra’s The Black Cauldron (1986) in Adventure Game Studio, free and non-commercial. A Monkey Island viewer is a sensible side quest for people who think in point-and-click.

The legal line is in the small print: “A fan-made reference. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Lucasfilm Games, LucasArts or Disney.” It is a viewer of screenshots, with no game inside it, so nobody is playing anything here. You could argue that is the safest way to love an old game.

Why do I care? Because “which version looks best?” used to get settled by memory. Memory of a CGA monitor is not reliable evidence. Pictures with the same crop are.

My money says the next wave of retro fan sites copies this layout: one scene, many machines, same box. A fixed frame makes comparison honest, and it is cheap once the captures exist.

Disney has not signed off on any of it.