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Here's a tought. GK1 supports 640x400 graphics, but the backgrounds are 320x200 and look really chunky on modern computers and don't justice to the original artwork at least in my opinion. So, I decided to extract a few images from the game and retouch them a bit to see whether they would scale to 640x400 nicely. I played around with a few images for few minutes and sure enough they scale up nicely, if coming a bit darker. The next obvious thing would be to properly re-paint the images (at least the parts that still are blurry), but I didn't want to do that much work without first asking someones opinion that would it be possible to inject these images back in to the game somehow and with the aforementioned resolution of 640x400?
Here's what moonbeams place looks like original scaled to 640x400:


And here's the retouched and scaled 640x400:


Before making any comments about the quality of the retouched one, it's nothing final, it took maybe five minutes to get that.
Now, anyone, do you know if what I suggest is possible?

I would think that you would have disassemble the game and and redo more of it than just the backgrounds. Much would be thrown off by the larger background. Walkpaths, etc. would be wrong. Musically Inspired might have more thoughts on this as he has worked some with SCI.

Don't get me wrong. I would love it if someone could inject higher rez graphics in the SCI games. At least GK1 supported VESA.

Collector has it right. I think it's more than just touching up. You'd have to somehow paint it so that the game knows what's solid and what's not on the screen, to form walking paths for the character to move around.

Even some of the game's scripting would need to be modified. Changing the background's resolution would alter coordinates. Think of the message "You are not close enough" when you tried to interact with an object because you were not in the right spot. If said object was originally at such and such X-Y point, enlarging the background would not necessarily automatically keep the coordinates in the same place in relation to the image of the background. Then the sprites would need to be enlarged, too. The latter would be a very desirable, though. It would be wonderful to see the sprites with at least twice the detail.

There may be some work arounds for some of this, since it is a VESA game. If you could make the game think that it had already scaled the VGA backgrounds to VESA.

It's too bad most Sierra games don't work with ScummVM. That program can slightly improve graphics for older games.

Just through rendering filters. But then so does DOSBox. SCI support in ScummVM is in development, just don't look for it to support the later SCI games anytime soon.

It must be that the original backgrounds are just scaled from 320x200 to 640x400, but are they just saved externally from the game engine to the higher resolution, or does the engine have some kind of scaler? If so, then how can it cope with the two resolutions, I mean the objects in the game are VESA, but backgrouds and sprites plain VGA? Wasn't it possible to change the game backgrounds in SCI Studio or similar software? I tried program called SV and while reads GK's resource files it doesn't allow to modify them. It gets the backgrounds 320x200, but the CD includes both hi-res and lo-res graphics and SV doesn't seem to find the hi-res ones at all. And I think the .p56 files include the walkpaths and forground/background data and it is possible to save them as well, the tricky part is putting them back together.

Here's the priority view saved from SV:

There are people that are still making games in SCI that might be able to give you more information at http://www.agigames.com/forum/index.php?board=5.0

Let us know if you make any progress.