Leisure Suit Larry 1 - bypass age verification?

tareon · Post by **tareon** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 9:45 am

The original interpreter of Larry let you bypass the age verification quiz by pressing and holding ctrl-alt-x during the titlescreen. Is there any way to achieve the same in ScummVM?

Charlii · Post by **Charlii** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:57 am

Would be nice, those questions are irritating as you don't know the answers to several of them if you haven't lived in the US. If that really was a "feature" of the original interpreter I don't see any reason to why it shouldn't be in ScummVM...

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 12:22 pm

I have no idea about skipping the quiz, but you can find the answers on Al Lowe's web site.

tareon · Post by **tareon** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 1:14 pm

It was a "feature" or let's call it a backdoor of the original interpreter. Al Lowe used it for himself during public presentations at the time (so he stated in an interview in a late 80's issue of a german gaming mag). Sierra left it in the release versions just like other debug commands for showing object/room numbers, heapsize informations, coordinates and other stuff of the AGI-Engine). Worked on all platforms (Amiga, Atari St, DOS...)

Just found on Al Lowe's website:

Trivia Quiz Age Check
While this isn't copy protection per se, it is a pain in the butt.
In the original, 1987 EGA version, you can bypass the trivia quiz completely by just pressing Alt-X.
In the remade, 1991 VGA version, I was much more sophisticated. There you have to add the Ctrl- key. Yep, you can bypass the trivia quiz by pressing Ctrl-Alt-X.
Don't you wish you had known these when you first played the game?

And as we know: Alt-X will quit ScummVM

Maybe it could be treated like the copy-protection of Monkey Island?

Post by **sev** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 2:23 pm

It is platform-dependent in ScummVM. For instance, in *nix quit key is Ctrl+Q, so original Alt+X in LSL1 works nice.

There is a (slowly) ongoing work on generic keymapper which will let solve this problem well, but now it is in early stages of development.

Eugene

Mud · Post by **Mud** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 2:59 pm

Go through the age protection once, and then use control-F5 to load your saved game.

tareon · Post by **tareon** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 7:38 am

@sev:
Good to hear

@Mud:
My concern is more the lack of the original behavior, than the annoyance the check causes. And by the way... F5 doesn't work. You have to use F7 to restore a saved game, to which the game only responses AFTER the age check.

md5 · Post by **md5** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:32 am

If I'm not mistaken, you can bypass the age verification check with alt-SHIFT-x

tareon · Post by **tareon** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 2:07 pm

@md5:
I will try that when I'm home. Is that documented somewhere?

Mataku · Post by **Mataku** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 2:45 pm

md5 wrote:If I'm not mistaken, you can bypass the age verification check with alt-SHIFT-x

didn't work for me.

Mud · Post by **Mud** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 2:49 pm

tareon wrote:My concern is more the lack of the original behavior, than the annoyance the check causes. And by the way... F5 doesn't work. You have to use F7 to restore a saved game, to which the game only responses AFTER the age check.

Hmm.. that's right. I thought the ScummVM GUI save-thingy bypassed, but I just checked and it doesn't. I know I have skipped it, but I don't remember how.

md5 · Post by **md5** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 3:37 pm

Mataku wrote:
md5 wrote:If I'm not mistaken, you can bypass the age verification check with alt-SHIFT-x
didn't work for me.

It works in the original AGI version of the game (the EGA one), not in the newer SCI version. Basically, alt-shift-x does not trigger SDL to exit, but it's interpreted as alt-x by the game engine

MusicallyInspired · Post by **MusicallyInspired** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 4:06 pm

It works on the SCI remake for the age verification but not the copy protection. The SCI remake added copy protection that you actually need the manual for, while the AGI game only had age verification. But I think it's a different key combination like Ctrl+X for the remake rather than Alt-X for the original.

noize · Post by **noize** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 8:56 pm

For the SCI version it depends on which version you are using. The CD collectors version doesn't have any copy protection.
The key combination to quit the aqe quiz for the SCI version is Ctrl-Alt-X.

MusicallyInspired · Post by **MusicallyInspired** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:37 am

Do you mean the CD version made specifically for the LSL1 remake? Or the CD collector's version as in the whole LSL collection? Because I have the collection (not the Vivendi re-release without LSL7 but the older and better Ultimate Pleasure Pack/Greatest Hits and Misses) and it does indeed ask for copy protection.