Sierra demos in your browser

[Collector]

Edit: Now choose from several Sierra demos to play. Try the Robin Hood talkie demo.

Sierra demos in your browser

[Tawmis]

Dude, that's pretty amazing. I was concerned, because during the Sierra logo there was a lot of flickering - but once the game started, the flickering ceased. Impressive!

[MusicallyInspired]

Works nicely. I noticed that there were no digital sound effects during the demo. Are there supposed to be?

[audiodane]

There were for me, like when the bar flipped open to try to go into the office. That is totally awesome. I will have to look into this jDOSBox more!

thanks,
..dane

[Collector]

There are, but they are not quite right in jDOSBox. I don't think the demo has the gunshot and yahoo on the intro screen that the full version has. You should have heard the tin can being drug across the jailhouse bars as you walk by.

[dotkel50]

I didn't hear sound effects last night either, so I just went back and tried it. Voila! I guess the sound was too low last night.

[gumby]

The music is wonderful. I've never played Freddy, but now I have even less of an excuse (at least to play the demo).

The on-line play makes it really accessible. So much so that I wish there was a way to do this with all the Sierra games & stay within the licensing agreements.

[Collector]

The music is wonderful. I've never played Freddy, but now I have even less of an excuse (at least to play the demo).

The game is an Al Lowe/Josh Mandel game. The CD version is the one to play. The Ballad of Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist on it is a digital recording with Al himself singing it. You can hear it on the Freddy Pharkas page. The player is just under the thumbnail of the box.

The on-line play makes it really accessible. So much so that I wish there was a way to do this with all the Sierra games & stay within the licensing agreements.

This is what Sarien.net will be for the AGI games. Should work even for the iPhones without jailbreaking them, in spite of the "walled garden"/no flash limitations. I'm thinking of doing this with more of the DOS demos. Perhaps a page of thumbnails that open up an iframe for jDOSBox in the center like you suggested on SCI Programming.

[MusicallyInspired]

Actually, the Disk version has tons of exclusives that Josh Mandel put into the game that Al removed for the CD version. Like a unique response for every inventory item cross-interaction and such. Josh loved to write. It was too much to record for the talkie CD version, but it's still a shame that it's missing.

[Collector]

Actually, the Disk version has tons of exclusives that Josh Mandel put into the game that Al removed for the CD version. Like a unique response for every inventory item cross-interaction and such. Josh loved to write. It was too much to record for the talkie CD version, but it's still a shame that it's missing.

Just an excuse to get both.

[gumby]

Dude, that's pretty amazing. I was concerned, because during the Sierra logo there was a lot of flickering - but once the game started, the flickering ceased. Impressive!

I've seen that with multiple games. Is this due to DOSBox using the speed/cycles 'auto' setting, so the speed is adaptive? The game starts off slow, dumping frames, and then increases to the appropriate speed?

[Collector]

It's worse if you set aspect=true, which makes me think that it might have more to do with rendering than cycles. Graphics are not quite as good as DOSBox and the SB emulation seems a little off, too. I don't think it uses SDL, but that might not be possible. I tried the Torin demo, but it doesn't run. It is a VESA SCI32 game. The more that I play with jDOSBox I see that it is not as close the the official DOSBox as I first thought. Still, for embedding in a webpage, it is great.

[Collector]

I have added several new demos to the page with many more to come. Check it out.

[Rath Darkblade]

Sigh... alas, I got zipola. I tried clicking on LSL7, and the Java screen began to work - however, I just got a black square.

So I gave up and tried Freddy Pharkas instead, and I got this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /jDOSBox/.html on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.17 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.17 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_jk/1.2.30 Server at sierrahelp.com Port 80

Not sure what the problem could be! *shrugs*

[gumby]

A small suggestion.

How about putting all the demos in a horizontal scroll (perhaps using a spin control for paging?) so that vertical scrolling of the entire page would not be necessary? So we could scroll through the other available titles while the current game is loading.