Cobb's closeup in the EGA version contains some unused graphics. There's an image of the word "Advertisement" which appears in the top left (as opposed to in the final game, where it's rendered as normal text), and a frame of his button with the text darker and the sparkle bigger. There's also an unused script that rapidly alternates between the two button frames, as if it's blinking on and off.
Here's what it looks like with these things reimplemented:
Compared to the final game:
It's not very easy on the eyes, which is probably why this went unused. It's also likely that the word "Advertisement" was replaced with actual text in order to make translation easier, or just to save on disk space.
In the EGA version, Mancomb is clearly sitting on a chair, but in the VGA versions, his chair is missing. The artist who did the VGA conversion for this scene seemingly forgot to draw it in.
All three Pirate Leaders are supposed to be sitting with their arms resting on the table, as can clearly be seen in their costume.
However, in both floppy versions, they were accidentally layered behind the table. This makes it look as if Blue and Green in particular are hiding their mugs under the table.
This was eventually fixed in the CD version.
Interestingly, at around 4:06:42 in the Video Game History Foundation's 30th anniversary Monkey Island stream, we see footage of the EGA version with the Pirate Leaders layered correctly. This commercial was created when the game was near the end of development, but not quite in its final state, as evidenced by the early title screen, which means the Pirate Leaders probably got messed up right at the last minute.
As a side-note, the description of those random wandering pirates as "the most sarcastic seamen ever to hoist the jolly roger" is incredibly funny to me.
In the EGA version, when the bar is full, the leftmost corner of Estevan's table doesn't correctly mask out Guybrush. Whenever he walks behind this part of the table, he'll appear "in front" of it very noticably.
Strangely, this stops being a problem as soon as the bar empties out.
Transparency and clipping is a little weird in SCUMM. The engine can draw things using transparent pixels and layers like we would today, but it can only do so for actors, such as Guybrush. The rest of the screen is basically just a flat image that the actors are drawn on top of. This means if something that's part of the background is supposed to be "in front" of those actors, it has to make use of a slightly more rudimentary technique.
Official SCUMM terminology for these things is "z-planes", but I will be calling them "clipping masks" because that's what they are and I think that name makes more sense. Essentially, every background and every object has a special one-bit clipping mask attached to it. It's sort of like an alpha channel, except instead of changing the visibility of the image, it just says for any given pixel whether an actor occupying that pixel should be drawn or masked out.
Here's what the bar's clipping mask looks like:
This looks about how we'd expect, right? The parts of the background that Guybrush is supposed to go behind (specifically, these three tables) are all colored white. So what's going wrong with the corner of that second table?
The fact that this only happens when the bar is full is the clue to figuring out the problem. Even though they're people, most of the pirates in the bar are technically objects, which means they use the same clipping mask system as the background.
Here's what the clipping masks for some of the pirates in the bar look like:
That third one is where our problem is. Those are the two pirates sitting at Mancomb's table in the back, but that tiny corner of Estevan's table is also there in the bottom right. The developers didn't bother giving these two a proper clipping mask, opting instead to leave it black, but that means when this object is drawn over the background, the pure-black clipping mask overrides those few white pixels that are supposed to be on the end of the table.
This was fixed in the VGA versions.
One of the pirates sitting at Estevan's table has a bandana around his head. In the EGA version, the bandana has two loose ends at the back, but they were removed in the VGA versions for unknown reasons. However, the clipping mask was never changed, so it still matches the EGA pirate's silhouette.
This means whenever Guybrush or the Cook walks behind this guy's head in the VGA versions, a tiny cutout shape of the bandana ends can be seen.
When Guybrush first tells the Pirate Leaders "I want to be a pirate!", in the brief pause before Blue responds with "So what?", Green does a special "shrug" animation where he splays his hand out. It's extremely easy to miss.
He also does the same animation repeatedly while Blue says "To be a pirate ye must also be a foul-smelling, grog-swilling pig."
If you take the vase from the mansion and try to fill it with grog from the barrel, it will instantly be destroyed.
The hunk of meat looks drastically different between the floppy versions and the CD version. In the CD version, it looks like a leg of ham, while in the floppy versions, it looks more like some kind of carcass or ribcage.
In the floppy versions, the puddle of grog under the tap is purple. In the CD version, it was changed to green, which is consistent with the other depictions of grog in the game.
Normally, the game will only ever let you take one yellow petal from the forest. Even after putting the dogs to sleep, Guybrush will refuse to take another.
The game makes one exception, though - if Guybrush puts the yellow petal into the pot of stew in the kitchen, then it will let him take a new one.
However, there's an alternative way of spiking the meat. Instead of combining the meat and petal directly, you can put them separately into the pot and then take the meat back out. If you do it this way, then the game will let you take another petal, because it thinks your old one is still in the pot.
You can now feed the pre-spiked meat to the dogs while also keeping the yellow petal in your inventory. The game will let you hold onto it until the beginning of Part 3, when it gets taken away.
