King's Quest 1 VGA Wallpaper

[Tawmis]

[Rath Darkblade]

Um ... hang on, what? I'm only familiar with the EGA version of this. (I thought AGDI released the VGA version of KQ1)?

[Tawmis]

Sierra called it "King's Quest 1 VGA" - see my post with the screenshot. They called all their remakes (KQ1, SQ1, PQ1, LSL1) "VGA" - I assume this is because the originals did not support VGA and it was an easy way to say "These are the new and improved versions!"

[MusicallyInspired]

Yeah, they called it VGA in that manual, but I consider that an oversight and a product of someone at the company just not knowing any better because EVERY other Sierra-made remake actually was VGA. The originals DO support VGA because they work on VGA cards. Or rather, VGA cards support them by being backwards compatible with EGA by design. But the graphics are clearly not VGA in the remake. And the remake even works on EGA cards and obviously looks exactly the same (the game graphics driver file itself is called EGA320.DRV). So it's not really VGA by any proper definition other than being supported in legacy form like the originals are as well. It doesn't showcase anything in VGA that it can't already do in EGA (maybe just a little faster, but that's also true of every other EGA SCI0/SCI0.1 game). You'd have to call every other EGA SCI game "VGA" because they all fill the same definition as KQ1SCI with the only exception being the added ability to scroll backgrounds (which is also not a VGA-specific thing). And VGA wasn't even a thing until after KQ4 and PQ2 were made. Also, they only started calling KQ1SCI "VGA" in the collections, never before AFAIK. If they did, it was misleading (possibly on purpose).

TL;DR: KQ1SCI is not VGA. Whoever wrote the manual either made an error or wrote it misleadingly on purpose to oversell the value. You can keep calling it VGA if you want to but just know that you are causing me internal pain every time you do it.

[Tawmis]

Yeah, they called it VGA in that manual, but I consider that an oversight and a product of someone at the company just not knowing any better because EVERY other Sierra-made remake actually was VGA. The originals DO support VGA because they work on VGA cards. Or rather, VGA cards support them by being backwards compatible with EGA by design. But the graphics are clearly not VGA in the remake. And the remake even works on EGA cards and obviously looks exactly the same (the game graphics driver file itself is called EGA320.DRV). So it's not really VGA by any proper definition other than being supported in legacy form like the originals are as well. It doesn't showcase anything in VGA that it can't already do in EGA (maybe just a little faster, but that's also true of every other EGA SCI0/SCI0.1 game). You'd have to call every other EGA SCI game "VGA" because they all fill the same definition as KQ1SCI with the only exception being the added ability to scroll backgrounds (which is also not a VGA-specific thing). And VGA wasn't even a thing until after KQ4 and PQ2 were made. Also, they only started calling KQ1SCI "VGA" in the collections, never before AFAIK. If they did, it was misleading (possibly on purpose).

TL;DR: KQ1SCI is not VGA. Whoever wrote the manual either made an error or wrote it misleadingly on purpose to oversell the value. You can keep calling it VGA if you want to but just know that you are causing me internal pain every time you do it.

They did it with all of the remakes.
They called the remake of LSL1 as "256 VGA" (See this ad for example), and specifies that "16 Color EGA is also available."

[MusicallyInspired]

Yes because all the other remakes are actually in 256-colour VGA as I said. The "16 colour EGA is also available" was referring to the actual alternate EGA versions of the SCI remakes. It was not referring to the AGI originals (that mailaway form card that came with some games to request 16-colour versions of the disks if you send away your 256-colour disks). LSL1VGA has an EGA version that's not AGI. So does KQ5, SQ1VGA, LSL5, PQ3, MUFT, Castle of Dr Brain, and a few more. In KQ1SCI's case it's already in EGA so it didn't need an alternate EGA version.

Here's a page from the WayBackMachine showing the differences between releases for Space Quest games (also a link to Longbow and King's Quest 5). https://web.archive.org/web/20070715133 ... reens.html

[Tawmis]

Yes because all the other remakes are actually in 256-colour VGA as I said. The "16 colour EGA is also available" was referring to the actual alternate EGA versions of the SCI remakes.

Yeah; I wasn't arguing what VGA was. Was just noting they called all the remakes "VGA"

[MusicallyInspired]

They never called KQ1SCI VGA until the collection manual. Oversight.