The original King's Quest had a long history of releases for the IBM PC and compatible platforms. The game was originally developed for the enhanced graphics and sound of the IBM PCjr. The PCjr. was hyped to the max and many media publications were predicting that IBM's consumer-focused machine would quickly dominate the home market when it was announced in November of 1983. Sierra Online was facing a troubling future and made good on a deal to publish an ambitious and revolutionary game for IBM's machine.
IBM bankrolled much of King's Quest's development, but the game would not be available at launch.
However, by the time King's Quest was released in May of 1984, the market had shown that it was not about to become IBM's playground. The PCjr. was overpriced cost twice as much as the Commodore 64 with a disk drive and did not offer much to the consumer that the C64 could not. The Apple IIe and //c computers were also strong competitors at the same price, offering a huge library of software. The PCjr struggled with compatibility with several popular IBM PC programs and included a keyboard that was laughable for trying to get real work done with it.
Showing posts with label AGI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AGI. Show all posts
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Sierra's Short-Lived Tandy Color Computer Support
In 1980 Radio Shack released its budget line of computers with the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer. Originally priced for $399.00 for the base model, it came with a 6809 CPU running at .894MHz, 4K of RAM and could display only upper case characters. It could be expanded to 16KB, then 32KB and finally 64KB. It had a built-in BASIC, a cartridge slot, two joysticks and a 53-key keyboard. Its most often used graphics mode was a 256x192 artifact mode capable of four primary colors (black, white, blue and orange). It used single sided, double density 5.25" drives that held 156,672 bytes per side for user data using Radio Shack DOS. Its sound hardware was a 6-bit DAC and it had a serial port and a cassette port. The Color Computer 2 was essentially the same machine with a better keyboard and more easily expandable RAM. Later CoCo 2s supported lower case text characters, unofficially. Both of these early CoCos were essentially limited to 64KB of RAM.
In many ways, the CoCo 1 and 2 reminds one of the Apple II+. Both machines really had a widespread maximum of 64KB of RAM. They used 8-bit processors running at speeds close to each other. Both machines can produce low resolution direct colors but really show detailed color images with NTSC composite artifact colors. If you subtract the purple/green combination from the Apple II, the graphics of a CoCo and an Apple can look very, very similar. Both machines had somewhat limited (pre-IBM layout) keyboards and did not support lowercase characters officially. Both came with ports for analog joysticks and cassette storage. The sound hardware for each machine was rather crude and neglected. Disk storage was only slightly better on the CoCo.
The CoCo 3 was a much more significant upgrade. It came with double the CPU speed, 128KB of RAM and could be officially expanded to 512KB of RAM. There were four extra keys on the keyboard. It had new RGB-based graphics modes which could support 16 out of 64 pure colors and supported several higher resolutions in 2 colors (640x192), 4 colors (320x192 and 640x192) and 16 colors (320x192).
In many ways, the CoCo 1 and 2 reminds one of the Apple II+. Both machines really had a widespread maximum of 64KB of RAM. They used 8-bit processors running at speeds close to each other. Both machines can produce low resolution direct colors but really show detailed color images with NTSC composite artifact colors. If you subtract the purple/green combination from the Apple II, the graphics of a CoCo and an Apple can look very, very similar. Both machines had somewhat limited (pre-IBM layout) keyboards and did not support lowercase characters officially. Both came with ports for analog joysticks and cassette storage. The sound hardware for each machine was rather crude and neglected. Disk storage was only slightly better on the CoCo.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Disappointing Use of Licenses in NES Games
Often, when a video game relied on a licensed character or movie, the results often were terrible. It is as if so much of the budget was taken up by the licensing fees that there was nothing left over to make a good game or hire good programmers. Most games based off movies are garbage on the NES, no one particularly enjoys having to play through Total Recall, Predator or Hudson Hawk. Many of those games were released by LJN or Acclaim, but picking on them is rather like picking the low hanging fruit.
Instead, I am going to focus on games from developers or publishers with a proven record of good games. My criteria for this blog entry is that the license has to come from another type of media, whether a film, a TV series, a cartoon, a toy line, a comic book or a novel
Konami :
Monster in My Pocket
This is a decent game, but when dealing with Konami, decent just doesn't cut it. While you have two characters you can play as, they aren't really all that different. This side scroller does not have any substantial flaws, but there is nothing especially memorable about it.
Star Trek 25th Anniversary
When I play this game, I get the feeling like it so wants to be the PC game of the same name. This is not surprising because Interplay was responsible for both. The NES game takes some elements of the classic PC adventure game like having crew members on the away team with different strengths and each officer on the bridge having his or her own position. However, the top down exploration stages with constantly respawning hidden enemies and maze-like environments does not feel very Star Trek 25th-Anniversary like to me.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Where do I begin? TMNT may have sold well but only because the Turtles craze was just beginning to establish itself. This game does have a certain Konami polish to the graphics and music, but the game is way too unfair. Enemies constantly respawn, there is laughable recovery time after being hit, the turtles have a huge hit area and except for Donatello their weapons do pathetic damage to their enemies. There are tricky jumps and the play control is a tad too loose. Flicker is all over the place.
The next two TMNT games for the NES are much better than this. I always get the feeling that with this first game, Konami really did not "get" the Turtles. While most of the elements that had been established by 1987 were there, the resulting game did not feel like an adaptation of the cartoon series, which was the catalyst and the focus of the phenomenon for the next several years. The moody music and outlandish enemy designs feel like they came more from the original comic than the cartoon.
I understand that the developers had little to work with, only elements from the comic book and season one of the animated cartoon were available as reference materials. However, the arcade game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also released in 1989 and does not feature any material beyond season one, yet that game was able to capture the spirit of the franchise admirably. Looks like Konami gave the NES game to the "B Team".
Top Gun I & II
Most NES flying games are not especially memorable, and these are no exception. One of the main problems are the endless hordes of indistinguishable enemies. The NES simply did not have the horsepower for anything more than rail-shooters, so these games don't offer you any real freedom. The first game has some of the most annoying landing sequences ever found in a video game and you cannot seem to turn fast enough to attack enemies. The second game overcompensates by having too sensitive controls and enemies that fly by too fast to hit.
Sunsoft :
Fester's Quest
While Sunsoft appeared to adapt the overhead view of Blaster Master for this game, that was about the only smart thing they did with the title. The Addams' Family is little seen and the Addams Family Mansion is reached only far into the game. The enemies constantly respawn and your gun and whip do little damage. A turbo controller is required to really play. Instead of losing gun or whip power when you get like Blaster Master, you lose it by touching gun and whip downgrades, which become more common as you power them up and are surprisingly easy to touch. Fester moves slowly, and if he gets hit by the flies, his movement rate gets far worse until he finds some shocks. You have a tiny lifebar and the bosses take a long time to beat. You find bosses in these buildings with featureless 3-D Mazes, something I always hated on the NES. There is almost nothing of the quirky macabre humor which the Addams Family was known for.
Platoon
This was a port of a Commodore 64 game, and while its not as bad as the port of Myth to Conan, the original game just isn't that good. The game is essentially a collection of mini-games, and usually in 8-bit land the sum is not the greater of its parts when it comes to different gameplay styles being combined in a cartridge. The first stage is a maze of finding objects, but most of the time you are simply trying to avoid dead ends. You are easy to hit, there are hard to see traps and bullets, and enemies can be unavoidable. The music is appropriately moody, but the backgrounds just appear to be shades of brown. The second stage is something like a 3-D maze, but at least it has something like a map. I never bothered to get past the second stage.
Capcom :
Disney's Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
As with Platoon, noted above, this is another collection of mini-games. The platforming in the Haunted Mansion is passable, but Space Mountain feels like Dragon's Lair with the "press the right button at the right time mechanic."
TaleSpin
Capcom made six games based off Disney TV franchises, and five of them (Ducktales 1 & 2, Chip 'N Dale 1 & 2, Darkwing Duck) were great. This one, while a decent game, is not great. Its a shump and has a certain amount of distinctiveness in that there are horizontal and vertical scrolling portions in the same level and that you can fly forwards and backwards. However, the chief issue is that the scale is wrong, the characters and enemies are too small to be really distinctive. Also, your character moves too slowly and his default gun is hard to aim diagonally, does little damage and upgrades are not plentiful.
Pony Canon/FCI :
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : Heroes of the Lance
Pony Canon/FCI could usually be counted on for reliable, if not spectacular ports of PC games, but this one is where they utterly failed to release a playable game. Heroes of the Lance is based off the Dragonlance Saga series of novels and AD&D campaign setting from TSR The object of the game is to take a party of eight heroes into a dungeon to recover a magic item. It was released first for PCs and then got a NES port. Whatever virtues the underlying game had, and they seem pretty sparse, were totally lost in translation.
This game has virtually no redeeming features. The in-game graphics suffer from being too small in relation to the background. The status menu takes up half the screen. The character sprites have so little detail and the backgrounds are just drab gray and black. The music is the same monotonous piece that seems to play throughout the game. There are only three types of enemies when you first start, a fighter, a dwarf and a lizard-creature. The latter two are both unfair, the dwarf attacks lower than you normally do, making him hard to hit. The lizard creature shoots projectiles at chest height and impossible to dodge. By the time you close in to melee with him, one of your characters may be dead. The control scheme and hit detection must have been devised in Hell, the very act of attacking is a chore. When you close into attack range, you can hold down the B button to attack, but it rarely registers a hit on a monster regardless of how close you are. Your characters move and attack so slowly. You can run by holding down a directional. Jumping across chasms is pretty much accomplished by luck.
This game has battery backed memory for saving games, but considering how awful this game is, it is a waste. There were far many better games more deserving of a battery save than this piece of garbage.
Kemco :
The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
This originally was a Roger Rabbit game when it first appeared on the Famicom Disk System, but Kemco only held the license in Japan so it did a graphics makeover using Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes characters when it was released. This game is very monotonous, with the same music playing over and over and very few environment changes. Weirdly, most of the enemies are differently colored Sylvesters with occasional appearances of Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote. However, in the original game, the Sylvesters were the Weasels, of which there were four in the movie. You cannot really stop yourself going in and out of doors and down an incline or scroll the screen to see what is just outside your view, leading to many cheap deaths.
The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
This game is more ambitious than Kemco's previous offering, but its far easier than you would expect.
Superman
Superman never had a great reputation for spawning great video games, and this one is almost as bad as the N64 title. Super-deformed characters and pastel graphics remind me of the Atari 2600 title, which was no classic. The music is nothing you will be humming in the shower either. Superman in this game can use several powers, but for only a very limited number of times unless you find a way to replenish each special power bar. He default attack is a punch, but the punch has no animation that tells the player the range of the attack. How close do you have to be to an enemy? It is hard to say. Of course, the enemies you first encounter shoot at you, and as either Clark Kent or Superman you are quite vulnerable to bullets. You jump almost to the top of the screen as either Clark or Superman. It does not take too much punishment to kill Superman, enemies can damage you even by touching and when they die they will often release an item that will reduce your life. The game gives you virtually no guidance on what you need to do.
Data East :
Captain America and the Avengers
As far as superhero games go on the NES, this may be the best of the bunch that is not part of the Batman franchise. You can play as Captain America or Hawkeye, but the two are not really that different. Captain America has a more limited range than Hawkeye shield comes flying back and he jump higher, but otherwise there is little else to distinguish the two. The main issue is that the play control is stiff. Graphics are okay, but the music is bland. Compared to X-Men, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man, this is probably the high water mark for Marvel Comics-based NES games, but that is damning with faint praise.
Taito :
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Weirdly, both Taito and Ubisoft released games based off the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They could not be more completely different. Ubisoft's version was atrocious and looks like a port from the ZX Spectrum. However, Ubisoft doesn't have a reputation for NES classics, Taito does, but not judging by this game. The graphics are small and hard to distinghuish. The game is very monochromatic with brown and gray hues throughout. Trying to digitize real life photographic images never works on the NES, the palette color restrictions make it almost impossible to do well. The music, after a passable rendition of John Williams' music from the film, but otherwise it is pretty nondescript.
The gameplay reminds me of the PC game Bruce Lee, where you run back and forth trying to avoid bad guys, but having to fight them if you cannot. In fact, the Cross of Coronado level requires you to beat a certain number of them before you can acquire the cross. Fighting bad guys is just a button mash and many of them take lots of hits and inflict lots of hits on you. There are also overhead racing sequences like Spy Hunter and a timed puzzle with the move the blocks with one empty block. You are quickly given choices of what you can do, but in order to complete the game, you have to beat all stages.
Rare :
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Rare is known for some good NES games, although all its games during this period were published by third parties. Unfortunately, Roger Rabbit's official NES game is no better than what was done with Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle. Roger Rabbit is an adventure game where you collect items to overcome obstacles and there are lots of items to collect. The most important objects are the four pieces of Marvin Acme's Will, scattered across four areas of Los Angeles. Most items unfortunately only have a limited number of uses and replacements are hard to come by. That is because almost all the items in the game are completely randomized when you start a new game. You can go around the four areas of the game world and talk to people, but most are unhelpful. You have to protect Roger, who is otherwise useless, from the Weasels.
Some items allow you bypass obstacles, rattles get you past rattlesnakes, a rose lets you talk to Jessica Rabbit, and TNT and a Detonator lets you break the barrier to the Toontown tunnel. Others like the gun and exploding cigars, are more useful as weapons. You shouldn't go into caves without a flashlight, rattles and spring boots. You can find and ride Benny the Cab, which is far faster than walking across L.A. If you encounter weasels, you have a limited amount of time to select the punchline to a joke or they capture Roger and you lose a life. You also lose a life if you get run over, fall into a pit or get bumped too many times and lose your sense of humor.
The graphics and music for the game is pretty appropriate. Unfortunately, you will have a hard time from keeping from bumping into things like cats and dogs. They can bump you while you are searching drawers and desks for items or talking to people and you cannot move to avoid them while you search or talk Also, defeating Judge Doom at the end of the game will have you throwing your controller at the screen.
Mostly, this game is about constant searching, everywhere, for everything. There is little sense of progression, just doing the same thing over and over and over again. It takes seemingly forever to search desks and cabinets, and the game has lots and lots of them. The people can sometimes tell you if the building has items in it. The maps reuse the same tiles over and over, making it easy to get lost. The items are mostly randomized, which may have worked in Atari's Adventure when there were only six, but not when you need to collect almost two dozen. Finally, the game gives you three lives and two continues, but when you lose those continues, you have to start over from the beginning. The game has a 22 digit password, but as a final kick in the teeth, you have ONLY 45 SECONDS to write it down.
Instead, I am going to focus on games from developers or publishers with a proven record of good games. My criteria for this blog entry is that the license has to come from another type of media, whether a film, a TV series, a cartoon, a toy line, a comic book or a novel
Konami :
Monster in My Pocket
This is a decent game, but when dealing with Konami, decent just doesn't cut it. While you have two characters you can play as, they aren't really all that different. This side scroller does not have any substantial flaws, but there is nothing especially memorable about it.
Star Trek 25th Anniversary
When I play this game, I get the feeling like it so wants to be the PC game of the same name. This is not surprising because Interplay was responsible for both. The NES game takes some elements of the classic PC adventure game like having crew members on the away team with different strengths and each officer on the bridge having his or her own position. However, the top down exploration stages with constantly respawning hidden enemies and maze-like environments does not feel very Star Trek 25th-Anniversary like to me.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Where do I begin? TMNT may have sold well but only because the Turtles craze was just beginning to establish itself. This game does have a certain Konami polish to the graphics and music, but the game is way too unfair. Enemies constantly respawn, there is laughable recovery time after being hit, the turtles have a huge hit area and except for Donatello their weapons do pathetic damage to their enemies. There are tricky jumps and the play control is a tad too loose. Flicker is all over the place.
The next two TMNT games for the NES are much better than this. I always get the feeling that with this first game, Konami really did not "get" the Turtles. While most of the elements that had been established by 1987 were there, the resulting game did not feel like an adaptation of the cartoon series, which was the catalyst and the focus of the phenomenon for the next several years. The moody music and outlandish enemy designs feel like they came more from the original comic than the cartoon.
I understand that the developers had little to work with, only elements from the comic book and season one of the animated cartoon were available as reference materials. However, the arcade game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also released in 1989 and does not feature any material beyond season one, yet that game was able to capture the spirit of the franchise admirably. Looks like Konami gave the NES game to the "B Team".
Top Gun I & II
Most NES flying games are not especially memorable, and these are no exception. One of the main problems are the endless hordes of indistinguishable enemies. The NES simply did not have the horsepower for anything more than rail-shooters, so these games don't offer you any real freedom. The first game has some of the most annoying landing sequences ever found in a video game and you cannot seem to turn fast enough to attack enemies. The second game overcompensates by having too sensitive controls and enemies that fly by too fast to hit.
Sunsoft :
Fester's Quest
While Sunsoft appeared to adapt the overhead view of Blaster Master for this game, that was about the only smart thing they did with the title. The Addams' Family is little seen and the Addams Family Mansion is reached only far into the game. The enemies constantly respawn and your gun and whip do little damage. A turbo controller is required to really play. Instead of losing gun or whip power when you get like Blaster Master, you lose it by touching gun and whip downgrades, which become more common as you power them up and are surprisingly easy to touch. Fester moves slowly, and if he gets hit by the flies, his movement rate gets far worse until he finds some shocks. You have a tiny lifebar and the bosses take a long time to beat. You find bosses in these buildings with featureless 3-D Mazes, something I always hated on the NES. There is almost nothing of the quirky macabre humor which the Addams Family was known for.
Platoon
This was a port of a Commodore 64 game, and while its not as bad as the port of Myth to Conan, the original game just isn't that good. The game is essentially a collection of mini-games, and usually in 8-bit land the sum is not the greater of its parts when it comes to different gameplay styles being combined in a cartridge. The first stage is a maze of finding objects, but most of the time you are simply trying to avoid dead ends. You are easy to hit, there are hard to see traps and bullets, and enemies can be unavoidable. The music is appropriately moody, but the backgrounds just appear to be shades of brown. The second stage is something like a 3-D maze, but at least it has something like a map. I never bothered to get past the second stage.
Capcom :
Disney's Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
As with Platoon, noted above, this is another collection of mini-games. The platforming in the Haunted Mansion is passable, but Space Mountain feels like Dragon's Lair with the "press the right button at the right time mechanic."
TaleSpin
Capcom made six games based off Disney TV franchises, and five of them (Ducktales 1 & 2, Chip 'N Dale 1 & 2, Darkwing Duck) were great. This one, while a decent game, is not great. Its a shump and has a certain amount of distinctiveness in that there are horizontal and vertical scrolling portions in the same level and that you can fly forwards and backwards. However, the chief issue is that the scale is wrong, the characters and enemies are too small to be really distinctive. Also, your character moves too slowly and his default gun is hard to aim diagonally, does little damage and upgrades are not plentiful.
Pony Canon/FCI :
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : Heroes of the Lance
Pony Canon/FCI could usually be counted on for reliable, if not spectacular ports of PC games, but this one is where they utterly failed to release a playable game. Heroes of the Lance is based off the Dragonlance Saga series of novels and AD&D campaign setting from TSR The object of the game is to take a party of eight heroes into a dungeon to recover a magic item. It was released first for PCs and then got a NES port. Whatever virtues the underlying game had, and they seem pretty sparse, were totally lost in translation.
This game has virtually no redeeming features. The in-game graphics suffer from being too small in relation to the background. The status menu takes up half the screen. The character sprites have so little detail and the backgrounds are just drab gray and black. The music is the same monotonous piece that seems to play throughout the game. There are only three types of enemies when you first start, a fighter, a dwarf and a lizard-creature. The latter two are both unfair, the dwarf attacks lower than you normally do, making him hard to hit. The lizard creature shoots projectiles at chest height and impossible to dodge. By the time you close in to melee with him, one of your characters may be dead. The control scheme and hit detection must have been devised in Hell, the very act of attacking is a chore. When you close into attack range, you can hold down the B button to attack, but it rarely registers a hit on a monster regardless of how close you are. Your characters move and attack so slowly. You can run by holding down a directional. Jumping across chasms is pretty much accomplished by luck.
This game has battery backed memory for saving games, but considering how awful this game is, it is a waste. There were far many better games more deserving of a battery save than this piece of garbage.
Kemco :
The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
This originally was a Roger Rabbit game when it first appeared on the Famicom Disk System, but Kemco only held the license in Japan so it did a graphics makeover using Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes characters when it was released. This game is very monotonous, with the same music playing over and over and very few environment changes. Weirdly, most of the enemies are differently colored Sylvesters with occasional appearances of Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote. However, in the original game, the Sylvesters were the Weasels, of which there were four in the movie. You cannot really stop yourself going in and out of doors and down an incline or scroll the screen to see what is just outside your view, leading to many cheap deaths.
The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
This game is more ambitious than Kemco's previous offering, but its far easier than you would expect.
Superman
Superman never had a great reputation for spawning great video games, and this one is almost as bad as the N64 title. Super-deformed characters and pastel graphics remind me of the Atari 2600 title, which was no classic. The music is nothing you will be humming in the shower either. Superman in this game can use several powers, but for only a very limited number of times unless you find a way to replenish each special power bar. He default attack is a punch, but the punch has no animation that tells the player the range of the attack. How close do you have to be to an enemy? It is hard to say. Of course, the enemies you first encounter shoot at you, and as either Clark Kent or Superman you are quite vulnerable to bullets. You jump almost to the top of the screen as either Clark or Superman. It does not take too much punishment to kill Superman, enemies can damage you even by touching and when they die they will often release an item that will reduce your life. The game gives you virtually no guidance on what you need to do.
Data East :
Captain America and the Avengers
As far as superhero games go on the NES, this may be the best of the bunch that is not part of the Batman franchise. You can play as Captain America or Hawkeye, but the two are not really that different. Captain America has a more limited range than Hawkeye shield comes flying back and he jump higher, but otherwise there is little else to distinguish the two. The main issue is that the play control is stiff. Graphics are okay, but the music is bland. Compared to X-Men, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man, this is probably the high water mark for Marvel Comics-based NES games, but that is damning with faint praise.
Taito :
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Weirdly, both Taito and Ubisoft released games based off the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They could not be more completely different. Ubisoft's version was atrocious and looks like a port from the ZX Spectrum. However, Ubisoft doesn't have a reputation for NES classics, Taito does, but not judging by this game. The graphics are small and hard to distinghuish. The game is very monochromatic with brown and gray hues throughout. Trying to digitize real life photographic images never works on the NES, the palette color restrictions make it almost impossible to do well. The music, after a passable rendition of John Williams' music from the film, but otherwise it is pretty nondescript.
The gameplay reminds me of the PC game Bruce Lee, where you run back and forth trying to avoid bad guys, but having to fight them if you cannot. In fact, the Cross of Coronado level requires you to beat a certain number of them before you can acquire the cross. Fighting bad guys is just a button mash and many of them take lots of hits and inflict lots of hits on you. There are also overhead racing sequences like Spy Hunter and a timed puzzle with the move the blocks with one empty block. You are quickly given choices of what you can do, but in order to complete the game, you have to beat all stages.
Rare :
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Rare is known for some good NES games, although all its games during this period were published by third parties. Unfortunately, Roger Rabbit's official NES game is no better than what was done with Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle. Roger Rabbit is an adventure game where you collect items to overcome obstacles and there are lots of items to collect. The most important objects are the four pieces of Marvin Acme's Will, scattered across four areas of Los Angeles. Most items unfortunately only have a limited number of uses and replacements are hard to come by. That is because almost all the items in the game are completely randomized when you start a new game. You can go around the four areas of the game world and talk to people, but most are unhelpful. You have to protect Roger, who is otherwise useless, from the Weasels.
Some items allow you bypass obstacles, rattles get you past rattlesnakes, a rose lets you talk to Jessica Rabbit, and TNT and a Detonator lets you break the barrier to the Toontown tunnel. Others like the gun and exploding cigars, are more useful as weapons. You shouldn't go into caves without a flashlight, rattles and spring boots. You can find and ride Benny the Cab, which is far faster than walking across L.A. If you encounter weasels, you have a limited amount of time to select the punchline to a joke or they capture Roger and you lose a life. You also lose a life if you get run over, fall into a pit or get bumped too many times and lose your sense of humor.
The graphics and music for the game is pretty appropriate. Unfortunately, you will have a hard time from keeping from bumping into things like cats and dogs. They can bump you while you are searching drawers and desks for items or talking to people and you cannot move to avoid them while you search or talk Also, defeating Judge Doom at the end of the game will have you throwing your controller at the screen.
Mostly, this game is about constant searching, everywhere, for everything. There is little sense of progression, just doing the same thing over and over and over again. It takes seemingly forever to search desks and cabinets, and the game has lots and lots of them. The people can sometimes tell you if the building has items in it. The maps reuse the same tiles over and over, making it easy to get lost. The items are mostly randomized, which may have worked in Atari's Adventure when there were only six, but not when you need to collect almost two dozen. Finally, the game gives you three lives and two continues, but when you lose those continues, you have to start over from the beginning. The game has a 22 digit password, but as a final kick in the teeth, you have ONLY 45 SECONDS to write it down.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Cajoling Sierra and LucasArts Games to Play Tandy Sound on a Non-Tandy System
Sierra's AGI engine games, which formed the bulk of their mid 80s PC offerings, supported Tandy graphics and sound. LucasArts' early SCUMM engine games also supported Tandy graphics and sound. As far as sound went, the Tandy 3-voice chip was the only alternative to the PC Speaker. However, Tandy sound chips were almost exclusively found in Tandy 1000s and PCjrs. They were not generally available in PCs and never available to the general public as a sound card.
The main reason why no one put the 3-voice TI SN76496 sound chip inside their PCs was because it utilized the same address space (C0-C7) as the 2nd DMA controller in the IBM PC AT and clones. The blame for this was on IBM, which had designed both the PCjr. and AT. Although the 2nd DMA controller was not really important until the mid 90s, PC clones that wanted to manufacture AT compatibles had to include it. While this was not the only reason why the sound chip was not generally available, it was a daunting hurdle when every game that used it had to write directly to the registers located at the contested I/O location(s).
Games cannot detect the Tandy sound chip because it can be written to but not read. They can detect a Tandy 1000 or an IBM PCjr. by reading identifier bytes in the BIOS area of these machines. For the PCjr. it is FD at F000:FFFE and 21 for the Tandy 1000s at FC00:0000. When the programmers have their programs search for these bytes, then they know that Tandy or PCjr. graphics and sound are present in the machine. However, Tandy allowed its machines, starting with the SX, to use other graphics cards, complicating matters.
Graphics cards can be detected by software. A MDA adapter can be identified by reading from a status port at 3BA and a CGA by a status port at 3DA. Hercules cards can be detected by some unused (by IBM) bits in the status port. An EGA, MCGA or VGA can be detected via BIOS extensions and readable registers, particularly at 3C0-3CF. MGCA can additionally be assumed if the system returns the ID byte for an IBM PS/2 Model 25 or 30, FA at F000:FFFE
Distinguishing CGA from Tandy video is tricky because Tandy video (almost) perfectly emulates the latter from a hardware perspective. There are generally two ways a programmer can distinguish CGA from Tandy video. First, Tandys use IRQ5 for vertical retrace, CGAs do not. However, often this functionality is disabled because hard drive adapters also tend to use IRQ5 in 8-bit slots. The other way is through the amount of video memory available. Tandy video can use 32KB while CGA video only uses 16KB, so if a program writes a value to a memory location in the lower 16KB and a different value to the memory location exactly 16KB above the first memory location written, if the first memory location is the same as the second memory location, you have a CGA, and if the locations are different, you have Tandy. This only works for CGA cards with access only to 16KB of RAM.
Despite these issues, an ISA card is being developed that will put Tandy sound on a non-Tandy PC. If it is completed, you will be able to run virtually any DOS game that allows you to specify the audio in an install or setup program of via the command line. Some games are a bit difficult when asked to do this, and here are instructions on how to coerce some games to work in this (for now) hypothetical scenario.
Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter
Games affected :
King's Quest I, II, III, Space Quest I, II, Mixed Up Mother Goose, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, The Black Cauldron, Donald Duck's Playground
Solution :
Any of these games released with an AGI Interpreter version of 2.917 or later can support Tandy sound with an EGA or VGA adapter present. The latest interpreters are also required to avoid having graphical garbage be left on the screen from animation due to some self-modifying code in the graphics card drivers the game uses in earlier interpreters. You will need the command line argument -t if you are not running the game on a Tandy 1000. This tells the executable to use Tandy graphics and sound, but the program conducts checks for an EGA or VGA adapter and will use them if present. It will still give you Tandy sound.
However, if you have a version of the game that uses an AGI Interpreter below 2.917, you will need to copy over the interpreter files from another game with that interpreter. Here are the interpreter files :
AGI or SIERRA.EXE
AGIDATA.OVL
CGA_GRAF.OVL
EGA_GRAF.OVL
HGC_FONT
HGC_GRAF.OVL
HGC_OBJS.OVL
IBM_OBJS.OVL
JR_GRAF.OVL
SIERRA.COM or KQ[1].COM, KQ2.COM, KQ3.COM, LL[LSL1].COM, PQ[1].COM, SQ[1].COM, SQ2.COM, BC.COM
VG_GRAF.OVL
The real executable is the AGI file, the .COM file is a loader which implemented the key disk copy protection. (The .COM file is also necessary to set up these games to work correctly on the PCjr., otherwise it is not needed). To keep people from using these files interchangeably, Sierra included the initials of the game in the encrypted AGI file. If that name does not match the game files, then the program will refuse to run. You will need a cracked .COM file and a program called AGI Decryptor to decrypt the AGI file into an executable AGI.EXE. Then you must hex edit the AGI.EXE file to change the name of the game. Then it will run.
Games using AGI Interpreters with 3.xx work without any intervention required.
This will not work with any booter game, as Tandy video is the best video adapter they support, without major hacking.
LucasArts SCUMM
Games Affected :
Maniac Mansion (both non-Enhanced and Enhanced), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (both non-Enhanced and Enhanced), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade : The Adventure Game (both 16-color and 256-color versions).
Solution :
These games autodetect Tandy 1000s and will use Tandy graphics and sound. If they are not being run in a Tandy 1000, they will use PC Speaker sound. They support an EGA or VGA card in a Tandy 1000. With a little bit of hex editing, you can force the executable to always use Tandy sound (but nothing else). The instructions can be found here : http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=31657#p260253
It is not impossible that the executable may be compressed because it was necessary to fit it on the floppy disks. In that case, you will need an EXE unpacker like UNP or LZEXE before you can hex edit the files.
Indy 3 will always use Adlib sound if an Adlib or Sound Blaster is in the system, even in a Tandy 1000. If you use the above method, you will need to remove the sound card to hear Tandy music. It will never autodetect a Game Blaster, which is supported in the 256-color versions and 16-color version 3.14.
While typically DOSBox's Tandy mode obviates the need for these patches, in the non-Enhanced versions of Maniac and Zak, you will be able to enjoy the crisper text of the EGA and VGA modes with this patch.
Notes :
Neither series of games will show the correct graphics with a CGA or Hercules card when these methods to force Tandy sound are used.
The main reason why no one put the 3-voice TI SN76496 sound chip inside their PCs was because it utilized the same address space (C0-C7) as the 2nd DMA controller in the IBM PC AT and clones. The blame for this was on IBM, which had designed both the PCjr. and AT. Although the 2nd DMA controller was not really important until the mid 90s, PC clones that wanted to manufacture AT compatibles had to include it. While this was not the only reason why the sound chip was not generally available, it was a daunting hurdle when every game that used it had to write directly to the registers located at the contested I/O location(s).
Games cannot detect the Tandy sound chip because it can be written to but not read. They can detect a Tandy 1000 or an IBM PCjr. by reading identifier bytes in the BIOS area of these machines. For the PCjr. it is FD at F000:FFFE and 21 for the Tandy 1000s at FC00:0000. When the programmers have their programs search for these bytes, then they know that Tandy or PCjr. graphics and sound are present in the machine. However, Tandy allowed its machines, starting with the SX, to use other graphics cards, complicating matters.
Graphics cards can be detected by software. A MDA adapter can be identified by reading from a status port at 3BA and a CGA by a status port at 3DA. Hercules cards can be detected by some unused (by IBM) bits in the status port. An EGA, MCGA or VGA can be detected via BIOS extensions and readable registers, particularly at 3C0-3CF. MGCA can additionally be assumed if the system returns the ID byte for an IBM PS/2 Model 25 or 30, FA at F000:FFFE
Distinguishing CGA from Tandy video is tricky because Tandy video (almost) perfectly emulates the latter from a hardware perspective. There are generally two ways a programmer can distinguish CGA from Tandy video. First, Tandys use IRQ5 for vertical retrace, CGAs do not. However, often this functionality is disabled because hard drive adapters also tend to use IRQ5 in 8-bit slots. The other way is through the amount of video memory available. Tandy video can use 32KB while CGA video only uses 16KB, so if a program writes a value to a memory location in the lower 16KB and a different value to the memory location exactly 16KB above the first memory location written, if the first memory location is the same as the second memory location, you have a CGA, and if the locations are different, you have Tandy. This only works for CGA cards with access only to 16KB of RAM.
Despite these issues, an ISA card is being developed that will put Tandy sound on a non-Tandy PC. If it is completed, you will be able to run virtually any DOS game that allows you to specify the audio in an install or setup program of via the command line. Some games are a bit difficult when asked to do this, and here are instructions on how to coerce some games to work in this (for now) hypothetical scenario.
Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter
Games affected :
King's Quest I, II, III, Space Quest I, II, Mixed Up Mother Goose, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, The Black Cauldron, Donald Duck's Playground
Solution :
Any of these games released with an AGI Interpreter version of 2.917 or later can support Tandy sound with an EGA or VGA adapter present. The latest interpreters are also required to avoid having graphical garbage be left on the screen from animation due to some self-modifying code in the graphics card drivers the game uses in earlier interpreters. You will need the command line argument -t if you are not running the game on a Tandy 1000. This tells the executable to use Tandy graphics and sound, but the program conducts checks for an EGA or VGA adapter and will use them if present. It will still give you Tandy sound.
However, if you have a version of the game that uses an AGI Interpreter below 2.917, you will need to copy over the interpreter files from another game with that interpreter. Here are the interpreter files :
AGI or SIERRA.EXE
AGIDATA.OVL
CGA_GRAF.OVL
EGA_GRAF.OVL
HGC_FONT
HGC_GRAF.OVL
HGC_OBJS.OVL
IBM_OBJS.OVL
JR_GRAF.OVL
SIERRA.COM or KQ[1].COM, KQ2.COM, KQ3.COM, LL[LSL1].COM, PQ[1].COM, SQ[1].COM, SQ2.COM, BC.COM
VG_GRAF.OVL
The real executable is the AGI file, the .COM file is a loader which implemented the key disk copy protection. (The .COM file is also necessary to set up these games to work correctly on the PCjr., otherwise it is not needed). To keep people from using these files interchangeably, Sierra included the initials of the game in the encrypted AGI file. If that name does not match the game files, then the program will refuse to run. You will need a cracked .COM file and a program called AGI Decryptor to decrypt the AGI file into an executable AGI.EXE. Then you must hex edit the AGI.EXE file to change the name of the game. Then it will run.
Games using AGI Interpreters with 3.xx work without any intervention required.
This will not work with any booter game, as Tandy video is the best video adapter they support, without major hacking.
LucasArts SCUMM
Games Affected :
Maniac Mansion (both non-Enhanced and Enhanced), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (both non-Enhanced and Enhanced), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade : The Adventure Game (both 16-color and 256-color versions).
Solution :
These games autodetect Tandy 1000s and will use Tandy graphics and sound. If they are not being run in a Tandy 1000, they will use PC Speaker sound. They support an EGA or VGA card in a Tandy 1000. With a little bit of hex editing, you can force the executable to always use Tandy sound (but nothing else). The instructions can be found here : http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=31657#p260253
It is not impossible that the executable may be compressed because it was necessary to fit it on the floppy disks. In that case, you will need an EXE unpacker like UNP or LZEXE before you can hex edit the files.
Indy 3 will always use Adlib sound if an Adlib or Sound Blaster is in the system, even in a Tandy 1000. If you use the above method, you will need to remove the sound card to hear Tandy music. It will never autodetect a Game Blaster, which is supported in the 256-color versions and 16-color version 3.14.
While typically DOSBox's Tandy mode obviates the need for these patches, in the non-Enhanced versions of Maniac and Zak, you will be able to enjoy the crisper text of the EGA and VGA modes with this patch.
Notes :
Neither series of games will show the correct graphics with a CGA or Hercules card when these methods to force Tandy sound are used.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Sierra's AGI Evolution
Over the years when Sierra was producing games using their Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) interface, the company would often update their games to fix bugs or add new features.
The first AGI game, King's Quest, was released for the IBM PCjr. and was only meant to be played on that system. However, as the PCjr. was not the smash hit that IBM and Sierra were betting on, Sierra quickly released a version for the IBM PC, essentially by substituting CGA and PC Speaker support for PCjr. graphics and sound support. This version could support 4-color CGA graphics using the red/green/brown palette or 16-color color composite graphics when the CGA card was connected to a color TV or composite monitor.
Although it would take time for people to realize it, this was a watershed moment for PC gaming, as finally a high-profile game was released for and designed for the PC. Previous PC games had been ports from the arcades or other home computers or from small-time publishers. Sierra would be the first high profile publisher to concentrate on the IBM PC platform.
When Tandy released its 1000 computer in 1985, which had almost exactly the same graphical capabilities (the main difference being a relocatable graphics buffer) and sound capabilities as the PCjr., Sierra released a third version of King's Quest for that computer. [A Tandy 1000/A/HD with only 128KB of memory can run the PCjr. version properly because the graphics buffer is in the same place as it would be on a PCjr.] These versions of King's Quest are known as AGI0. All later AGI releases support the PC and Tandy architectures, and most also support the PCjr. All AGI version 1 games also were self-booting disks that did not require DOS or support a hard drive. They did not have the white status/score bar, drop down menus and could only save games to a blank formatted floppy disk. They offered in-game commands to format a floppy disk. They could autodetect whether they were running on an IBM PC, IBM PCjr. or Tandy 1000. Release period is 1984-85.
The most significant and immediate hardware improvement in the second version of AGI was to offer support for EGA cards, so non-Tandy/PCjr. users could view the games graphics in the most colorful and sharpest mode available. The first game for the newer version, Donald Duck's Playground, was still a booter and a port of a C64 game that did not use AGI. There are a pair of hacked versions floating around that allow the game to be played in DOS, but they use Atari ST or Amiga resources and are not as reliable when compared to true PC releases. The game was subject to a license from Disney, and was not in release long enough for Sierra to produce an officially-hard drive installable version. AGI2 thereafter was able to install the game to a hard disk and save games on the hard disk. The early AGI interpreters still did not provide drop down menus, and speed control was not always present. Releases date from 1986.
All AGI10 and AGI1 games were eventually re-released in AGI2. Sierra added Hercules graphics support by the 2.4xx interpreters because Hercules cards were very popular in the mid-80s, by its early 1987 releases. Unlike other graphics adapter, the Hercules mode will show typed text in a box in the center of the screen and pause the action like the later SCI0 engine. The PC was, after all, primarily thought of as a business computer at this time and lots of PCs used monochrome TTL monitors and supported Hercules graphics. The drop down menu bar gets implemented, as are adjustable animation speeds for all games.
Later improvements added support for MCGA graphics for the users of the IBM PS/2 Models 25 & 30, MCGA and EGA not being compatible. Most 2.4 interpreter versions should support MCGA. If not, you would forced to use four color CGA. Also, since these games had key disk copy protection (requiring Disk #1 to be in the A: drive, even for a hard drive install), further fixes allowed the copy protection to work on 1.2MB drives for games with 360KB disks. The IBM PS/2 computers and the Tandy 1000HX and TX all had 3.5" disk drives built in, so around mid-1987 Sierra began shipping dual-format release games for DOS with both 5.25" disks and 3.5" disks of the game in the same box. Disk 1 for each disk type would be copy protected.
In all AGI2 games, the first disk for the game had to be inserted into the A: drive for the copy protection checks in the game executables to pass. The key disks used a track with a checksum error, overlaid data on the sectors and non-standard sector sizes. A standard PC floppy disk controller and DOS could not replicate these protections. Only a device like the Central Point Software Copy II PC Option Board could fully replicate the protection, SuperLok 3.2. The game's .com loader would make check for a bad track, and if found would then read a decryption key from it and decrypt the real executable, which is AGI. Even if the game was installed on the hard drive, the first disk had to be in the drive. Most versions of Police Quest were released without copy protection in an experiment in honesty. So-called "slash" budget releases of these games also have the protection removed.
AGI2 releases with interpreter 2.917 or later do not exhibit the issue of footprint tracks for animation on faster hardware with EGA and VGA cards. Sometimes Sierra shipped earlier versions on its Collection CDs. There is a fix available, see my January 22, 2015 post in this thread : http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?40365-Tandy-1000SX-Game-Issues
Bypassing the copy protection can be done in two ways. The first is to modify the loader program, typically called SIERRA.COM or something like KQ3.COM or SQ2.COM. The 128-byte encryption key is copied from track 6 into the.COM, the protection checks are bypassed and the .COM file will always decrypt the AGI file without needing or asking for the key disk. There are instructions to do this in debug, but Sierra used two versions of the 3.0 Loader, a 1985 and a 1987 version. The memory offsets are different for each. AGI interpreter versions up to and including 2.4x use the 1985 version of the loader, 2.9x versions use the 1987 version of the loader. The second is to permanently decrypt the AGI file. In this case, you do all the above but write the decrypted AGI file, which is in memory, to a file called AGI.EXE or SIERRA.EXE. After that, you run the .EXE file and that will start the game.
AGI3 signaled the shift from disk-based copy protection to document-based copy protection. Three games use the lookup the word in the manual method. There is no disk-based copy protection loader and the disks are perfectly standard DOS disks.
All games (except for Donald Duck's Playground) by the end of AGI2 had support for every graphics and sound standard widely supported on the market up to 1988. For graphics, this means CGA, PCjr., TGA, HGC, EGA, MCGA & VGA. For sound, all that was widely available and supported was the PC Speaker and the PCjr./Tandy 1000 PSG (Adlib and Roland MT-32 not having found game support until the middle of 1988, which coincided with the introduction of Sierra's SCI games). Release dates are 1988-1989.
All versions of these games check the computer's BIOS for the PCjr. or Tandy 1000 byte identifiers before initializing the three voice PSG sound data. This was standard in the days before games would freely let you choose your graphics and sound hardware. By default, if these games found those strings, they would load their PCjr. or Tandy 1000 graphics drivers. It is possible to force CGA graphics on a Tandy 1000 computer by using the -p command line argument. This will give you CGA Composite Color Graphics. You can also use -p -r to force CGA RGB Color Graphics. However, you will get annoying unintentional noises if you have previously run a game that uses Tandy sound prior to running an AGI game this way. Command line arguments for the SIERRA.COM loader include :
-c = Force CGA Composite Color Mode
-e = Force EGA
-h = Force Hercules
-r = Force CGA RGB Color Mode
-p = Force "PC Mode"
-s = Unknown
-t = Force Tandy 1000 Graphics and/or Sound
-v = Force MCGA/VGA
By accident or design, all AGI3 games and AGI2 games with the latest interpreters (greater than or equal to 2.917), will work in most Tandy 1000s with an EGA or VGA card installed. This combination will give you the sound of the Tandy PSG paired with an EGA or VGA card. The only Tandy 1000s that this does not work with are the original 1000, 1000A and 1000HD, because their graphics cannot be disabled, and the RSX. Tandy sound will not work on the RSX even though it has the chip because Tandy had to relocate it in the I/O map because the original location (C0-C7) conflicted with the I/O for the 2nd DMA controller added in the IBM PC AT (IBM is to blame here), so it is at 1E0-1E7. The RSX was released well after the AGI games. The Tandy 1000 RLX is a special case because it has built-in VGA on the motherboard and ports at the usual locations (no DMA 5-7). You must use these latest versions for AGI games to work at without sprite footprints on the RLX and its built-in VGA.
All the games as shown below have a release with an AGI interpreter version greater than or equal to 2.917 except for Mixed Up Mother Goose. In order to play that game on a hybrid Tandy system like the RLX, you need to use an interpreter from another game. However, it is not as simple as copying over a few files. The decrypted AGI file has the name of the game embedded in it, like KQ2 or SQ2. If the game does not match the name, it will refuse to interpret the game files. What you need to do is to permanently decrypt the AGI file with a version equal or greater than 2.917, change the name in the AGI file and use the file to run Mixed Up Mother Goose. There is a program called AGI Decryptor that can permanently decrypt the AGI file.
The specifications for the AGI engine are here : http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/AGI/Specifications and a description of the copy protection used is available and a utility to remove the protection is here : http://sierrahelp.com/GeneralHelp/FloppyDiskBackupProblems.html. Here are a list of games and their known versions :
The first AGI game, King's Quest, was released for the IBM PCjr. and was only meant to be played on that system. However, as the PCjr. was not the smash hit that IBM and Sierra were betting on, Sierra quickly released a version for the IBM PC, essentially by substituting CGA and PC Speaker support for PCjr. graphics and sound support. This version could support 4-color CGA graphics using the red/green/brown palette or 16-color color composite graphics when the CGA card was connected to a color TV or composite monitor.
Although it would take time for people to realize it, this was a watershed moment for PC gaming, as finally a high-profile game was released for and designed for the PC. Previous PC games had been ports from the arcades or other home computers or from small-time publishers. Sierra would be the first high profile publisher to concentrate on the IBM PC platform.
When Tandy released its 1000 computer in 1985, which had almost exactly the same graphical capabilities (the main difference being a relocatable graphics buffer) and sound capabilities as the PCjr., Sierra released a third version of King's Quest for that computer. [A Tandy 1000/A/HD with only 128KB of memory can run the PCjr. version properly because the graphics buffer is in the same place as it would be on a PCjr.] These versions of King's Quest are known as AGI0. All later AGI releases support the PC and Tandy architectures, and most also support the PCjr. All AGI version 1 games also were self-booting disks that did not require DOS or support a hard drive. They did not have the white status/score bar, drop down menus and could only save games to a blank formatted floppy disk. They offered in-game commands to format a floppy disk. They could autodetect whether they were running on an IBM PC, IBM PCjr. or Tandy 1000. Release period is 1984-85.
The most significant and immediate hardware improvement in the second version of AGI was to offer support for EGA cards, so non-Tandy/PCjr. users could view the games graphics in the most colorful and sharpest mode available. The first game for the newer version, Donald Duck's Playground, was still a booter and a port of a C64 game that did not use AGI. There are a pair of hacked versions floating around that allow the game to be played in DOS, but they use Atari ST or Amiga resources and are not as reliable when compared to true PC releases. The game was subject to a license from Disney, and was not in release long enough for Sierra to produce an officially-hard drive installable version. AGI2 thereafter was able to install the game to a hard disk and save games on the hard disk. The early AGI interpreters still did not provide drop down menus, and speed control was not always present. Releases date from 1986.
All AGI10 and AGI1 games were eventually re-released in AGI2. Sierra added Hercules graphics support by the 2.4xx interpreters because Hercules cards were very popular in the mid-80s, by its early 1987 releases. Unlike other graphics adapter, the Hercules mode will show typed text in a box in the center of the screen and pause the action like the later SCI0 engine. The PC was, after all, primarily thought of as a business computer at this time and lots of PCs used monochrome TTL monitors and supported Hercules graphics. The drop down menu bar gets implemented, as are adjustable animation speeds for all games.
Later improvements added support for MCGA graphics for the users of the IBM PS/2 Models 25 & 30, MCGA and EGA not being compatible. Most 2.4 interpreter versions should support MCGA. If not, you would forced to use four color CGA. Also, since these games had key disk copy protection (requiring Disk #1 to be in the A: drive, even for a hard drive install), further fixes allowed the copy protection to work on 1.2MB drives for games with 360KB disks. The IBM PS/2 computers and the Tandy 1000HX and TX all had 3.5" disk drives built in, so around mid-1987 Sierra began shipping dual-format release games for DOS with both 5.25" disks and 3.5" disks of the game in the same box. Disk 1 for each disk type would be copy protected.
In all AGI2 games, the first disk for the game had to be inserted into the A: drive for the copy protection checks in the game executables to pass. The key disks used a track with a checksum error, overlaid data on the sectors and non-standard sector sizes. A standard PC floppy disk controller and DOS could not replicate these protections. Only a device like the Central Point Software Copy II PC Option Board could fully replicate the protection, SuperLok 3.2. The game's .com loader would make check for a bad track, and if found would then read a decryption key from it and decrypt the real executable, which is AGI. Even if the game was installed on the hard drive, the first disk had to be in the drive. Most versions of Police Quest were released without copy protection in an experiment in honesty. So-called "slash" budget releases of these games also have the protection removed.
AGI2 releases with interpreter 2.917 or later do not exhibit the issue of footprint tracks for animation on faster hardware with EGA and VGA cards. Sometimes Sierra shipped earlier versions on its Collection CDs. There is a fix available, see my January 22, 2015 post in this thread : http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?40365-Tandy-1000SX-Game-Issues
Bypassing the copy protection can be done in two ways. The first is to modify the loader program, typically called SIERRA.COM or something like KQ3.COM or SQ2.COM. The 128-byte encryption key is copied from track 6 into the.COM, the protection checks are bypassed and the .COM file will always decrypt the AGI file without needing or asking for the key disk. There are instructions to do this in debug, but Sierra used two versions of the 3.0 Loader, a 1985 and a 1987 version. The memory offsets are different for each. AGI interpreter versions up to and including 2.4x use the 1985 version of the loader, 2.9x versions use the 1987 version of the loader. The second is to permanently decrypt the AGI file. In this case, you do all the above but write the decrypted AGI file, which is in memory, to a file called AGI.EXE or SIERRA.EXE. After that, you run the .EXE file and that will start the game.
AGI3 signaled the shift from disk-based copy protection to document-based copy protection. Three games use the lookup the word in the manual method. There is no disk-based copy protection loader and the disks are perfectly standard DOS disks.
All games (except for Donald Duck's Playground) by the end of AGI2 had support for every graphics and sound standard widely supported on the market up to 1988. For graphics, this means CGA, PCjr., TGA, HGC, EGA, MCGA & VGA. For sound, all that was widely available and supported was the PC Speaker and the PCjr./Tandy 1000 PSG (Adlib and Roland MT-32 not having found game support until the middle of 1988, which coincided with the introduction of Sierra's SCI games). Release dates are 1988-1989.
All versions of these games check the computer's BIOS for the PCjr. or Tandy 1000 byte identifiers before initializing the three voice PSG sound data. This was standard in the days before games would freely let you choose your graphics and sound hardware. By default, if these games found those strings, they would load their PCjr. or Tandy 1000 graphics drivers. It is possible to force CGA graphics on a Tandy 1000 computer by using the -p command line argument. This will give you CGA Composite Color Graphics. You can also use -p -r to force CGA RGB Color Graphics. However, you will get annoying unintentional noises if you have previously run a game that uses Tandy sound prior to running an AGI game this way. Command line arguments for the SIERRA.COM loader include :
-c = Force CGA Composite Color Mode
-e = Force EGA
-h = Force Hercules
-r = Force CGA RGB Color Mode
-p = Force "PC Mode"
-s = Unknown
-t = Force Tandy 1000 Graphics and/or Sound
-v = Force MCGA/VGA
By accident or design, all AGI3 games and AGI2 games with the latest interpreters (greater than or equal to 2.917), will work in most Tandy 1000s with an EGA or VGA card installed. This combination will give you the sound of the Tandy PSG paired with an EGA or VGA card. The only Tandy 1000s that this does not work with are the original 1000, 1000A and 1000HD, because their graphics cannot be disabled, and the RSX. Tandy sound will not work on the RSX even though it has the chip because Tandy had to relocate it in the I/O map because the original location (C0-C7) conflicted with the I/O for the 2nd DMA controller added in the IBM PC AT (IBM is to blame here), so it is at 1E0-1E7. The RSX was released well after the AGI games. The Tandy 1000 RLX is a special case because it has built-in VGA on the motherboard and ports at the usual locations (no DMA 5-7). You must use these latest versions for AGI games to work at without sprite footprints on the RLX and its built-in VGA.
All the games as shown below have a release with an AGI interpreter version greater than or equal to 2.917 except for Mixed Up Mother Goose. In order to play that game on a hybrid Tandy system like the RLX, you need to use an interpreter from another game. However, it is not as simple as copying over a few files. The decrypted AGI file has the name of the game embedded in it, like KQ2 or SQ2. If the game does not match the name, it will refuse to interpret the game files. What you need to do is to permanently decrypt the AGI file with a version equal or greater than 2.917, change the name in the AGI file and use the file to run Mixed Up Mother Goose. There is a program called AGI Decryptor that can permanently decrypt the AGI file.
The specifications for the AGI engine are here : http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/AGI/Specifications and a description of the copy protection used is available and a utility to remove the protection is here : http://sierrahelp.com/GeneralHelp/FloppyDiskBackupProblems.html. Here are a list of games and their known versions :
| Game Name | AGI Int. Ver. | Game Ver. | Floppies | Protection | File Date | Loader 3.0 Yr | Interaction Newsletter | Notes |
| Black Cauldron, The | 1.12 | 1.1J | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| Black Cauldron, The | 1.12 | 1.1K | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| Black Cauldron, The | 1.12 | 1.1K Tandy | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| Black Cauldron, The | 1.12 | 1.1M | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| Black Cauldron, The | 2.44 | 2.00 | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 06/14/87 | 1985 | Fall 1987 | MCGA fix |
| Black Cauldron, The | 3.002.098 | 2.10 | 2x360KB | None | 11/10/88 | NP | ||
| Christmas Card | 2.272 | 1 | 1x360KB | None | 11/13/86 | NP | Christmas Demo | |
| Donald Duck's Playground | 2.001 | 1.0Q | 1x360KB | Booter | 06/09/86 | |||
| Gold Rush | 3.002.149 | 2.01 | 5x360KB/2x720KB | Manual Word Lookup | 12/22/88 | NP | ||
| King's Quest | 1 | 1.00 | 1x360KB | Booter | 1984 | Licensed to IBM | ||
| King's Quest | 1 | none | 1x360KB | Booter | 1984 | Generic PC version | ||
| King's Quest | 1 | 01.01.00 | 1x360KB | Booter | 1984 | Licensed to Tandy | ||
| King's Quest | 1 | ? | 1x360KB | Booter | 1984-1985 | Came as second disk in later PC booter releases, functionally equivalent to Tandy 1000 version | ||
| King's Quest – Quest for the Crown | 2.272 | 1.0U | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 11/14/86 | 1985 | ||
| King's Quest – Quest for the Crown | 2.425 | 2.0F | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 04/1987 | 1985 | ||
| King's Quest – Quest for the Crown | 2.917 | 2.0F | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 05/05/87 | 1987 | Fall 1987 | 1.2meg Fix, MCGA & Hercules Support |
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 1 | 1.0W | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 1 | 1.1H | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | |||
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 1 | 01.01.00 | 2x360KB | Booter | 1985 | Licensed to Tandy | ||
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 2.411 | 2.1 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 04/10/87 | 1985 | ||
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 2.426 | 2.2 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 05/07/87 | NP? | Fall 1987 | MCGA fix |
| King's Quest II – Romancing the Throne | 2.917 | 2.2 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 12/01/87 | 1987 | ||
| King's Quest III – To Heir is Human | 2.272 | 1.01 | 3x360KB | Key Disk | 11/08/86 | 1985 | ||
| King's Quest III – To Heir is Human | 2.435 | 2.00 | 3x360KB | Key Disk | 05/25/87 | 1985 | Fall 1987 | |
| King's Quest III – To Heir is Human | 2.936 | 2.14 | 2x720KB | Key Disk | 03/15/88 | 1987 | Spring 1988 | MCGA fix |
| King's Quest IV – The Perils of Rosella | 3.002.086 | 2.00 | 3x720KB | Manual Word Lookup | 07/27/88 | NP | Hercules & PCjr. Support | |
| King's Quest IV – The Perils of Rosella | 3.002.086 | 2.3 | 6x360KB | Manual Word Lookup | 09/27/88 | NP | ||
| Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards | 2.440 | 1.00 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 06/01/87 | 1985 | Spring 1988 | |
| Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards | 2.917 | 1.00 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 12/01/87 | 1987 | ||
| Manhunter – New York | 3.002.102 | 1.22 | 5x360KB/2x720KB | Manual Word Lookup | 08/31/88 | NP | ||
| Manhunter – New York | 3.002.107 | 1.22 | 5x360KB/2x720KB | Manual Word Lookup | 09/01/88 | NP | ||
| Manhunter 2 – San Franscisco | 3.002.149 | 3.02 | 3x720KB | None | 07/26/89 | NP | ||
| Manhunter 2 – San Franscisco | 3.002.149 | 3.03 | 8x360KB | None | 08/17/89 | NP | Disk swapping problems fix | |
| Mixed-Up Mother Goose | 2.915 | 1.0D | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 11/10/87 | NP? | Spring 1988 | |
| Police Quest - In Pursuit of the Death Angel | 2.903 | 2.0A | 3x360KB | Key Disk | 10/23/87 | NP | ||
| Police Quest - In Pursuit of the Death Angel | 2.911 | 2.0A | 3x360KB | Key Disk | 11/04/87 | NP | ||
| Police Quest - In Pursuit of the Death Angel | 2.915 | 2.0E | 3x360KB | Key Disk | 11/17/87 | NP | ||
| Police Quest - In Pursuit of the Death Angel | 2.917 | 2.0G | 3x360KB/2x720KB | Key Disk/None | 12/03/87 | NP | Spring 1988 | PCjr. Support |
| Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter | 2.089 | 1.0X | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 09/24/86 | 1985 | ||
| Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter | 2.272 | 1.1A | 2x360KB | Key Disk | 11/13/86 | 1985 | ||
| Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter | 2.426 | 2.2 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 05/07/87 | 1985 | Fall 1987 | MCGA fix |
| Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter | 2.917 | 2.2 | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 12/01/87 | 1987 | ||
| Space Quest 2 - Vohaul's Revenge | 2.912 | 2.0A | 2x360KB/1x720KB | Key Disk | 11/06/87 | 1987 | Spring 1988 | MCGA fix |
| Space Quest 2 - Vohaul's Revenge | 2.936 | 2.0D | 1x720KB | Key Disk | 03/14/88 | 1987 | Bug Fix | |
| Space Quest 2 - Vohaul's Revenge | 2.936 | 2.0F | 1x720KB | Key Disk | 01/01/89 | 1987 |
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