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So I stumbled across this on a facebook thread - but, for the love of the gods, this helps my sanity. King's Quest 1 bootable version is the KQ I remember initially playing at my friend Shawn's house.

Cool to see a write up about those versions.

Yeap, the booters were the ones I had originally. I liked watching the backgrounds draw themselves. And it's interesting to notice other little differences. Like the sound & the look of the alligators were different

Haven't seen it on Facebook yet, but there has been some discussion on SCI Programmers. The original is not purely AGI, but essentially a precursor. It shares specs between the so called "pre-AGI" games like Winnie the Pooh and A Trolls Tale and what AGI finally became.

This information came from some dissection of KQ by NewRisingSun. Lance Ewing is studying it further as part of his efforts to write a new interpreter in C# to learn C# and to flesh out the AGI C# library that our new AGI IDE uses.


All of the AGI and SCI0 games can be seen drawing the backgrounds if you slow them down enough. They all draw them the same, it is only a matter of speed. If you want to see it simply drop your DOSBox cycles to something really low.

Collector wrote:Haven't seen it on Facebook yet, but there has been some discussion on SCI Programmers. The original is not purely AGI, but essentially a precursor. It shares specs between the so called "pre-AGI" games like Winnie the Pooh and A Trolls Tale and what AGI finally became.
This information came from some dissection of KQ by NewRisingSun. Lance Ewing is studying it further as part of his efforts to write a new interpreter in C# to learn C# and to flesh out the AGI C# library that our new AGI IDE uses.
All of the AGI and SCI0 games can be seen drawing the backgrounds if you slow them down enough. They all draw them the same, it is only a matter of speed. If you want to see it simply drop your DOSBox cycles to something really low.

Somewhere on here - there's me rambling that the KQ1 I remember was essentially something about the color (I think I remember it being like 4 or 8 colors...) EDIT: Found it.

So I'd agree that it seems to be "pre-AGI."

As for the coloring, it did it like paint fills (without slowing down the machine - for example, Graham would walk normal speeds and when you enter a forest, you'd see the green color, then the brown, then the ground, etc). I get that slowing it down gives the same effect, but with these the game was moving at "normal" speeds when it'd do the color fills.

When I 1st played KQ1 it only had 4 colors because we didn't have a EGA graphics card. But it didn't have the 4 CGA colors. It used RGB where the 4 colors were different. Like the whites were yellow. Here is a screenshot from Mobygames that shows what it looked like...

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/kings ... tId,21860/

If you ever want to play it the way I remember, you can set the machine to CGA in the DOSBox config, then when you start the game, hit Ctrl + R to switch to the RGB colors

I just tested various AGI games in DOSBox really low cycles. I wasn't able to see the screens being drawn. Instead, any time I changed screens, there was a long delay, and then the full screen would be drawn, from bottom to top. So it looks like, instead of drawing directly onto the screen, it instead draws on a buffer and then puts the contents of that buffer onto the screen once everything is done rendering. So I guess the bootable versions of KQ1+2 didn't have that technology and instead drew on the screen directly. I know that's what those other pre-AGI games do.