Old Sierra Adventures?

[DarkSoul]

Well, if you're interested in playing the very old Sierra AGI games, I'd recommend trying out... ScummVM. Yesterday, Aquadran imported an AGI engine into ScummVM, and the binaries available on the Downloads page includes this engine. I'm not entirely sure exactly which games are supported, but I know for sure it supports King's Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry 1, and Space Quest 2 (Not the VGA remakes, mind you). Those are the old ones I actually have myself, but there're probably a few more - I'll leave it to others to confirm.

Kudos to whoever contributed to this magnificent new engine! I never thought I'd see the day when ScummVM would enable me to play Sierra games.

-E

I've tested it on Space Quest 0,1,2 and Lost Chapter. Only found a few bugs. But considering its only a few for an engine thats just been introduced. Bloody excellient.

[Eilhan]

I've tested it on Space Quest 0,1,2 and Lost Chapter. Only found a few bugs. But considering its only a few for an engine thats just been introduced. Bloody excellient.

I most definitely agree! So far I've only tested this under Windows, playing KQ 1 and LSL1. As an amateur coder myself, I really don't want to think about how much work must have gone into taking the original Sarien source code and turning it into a ScummVM compatible engine. Lots and lots of work, oh dear...

[DarkSoul]

I really don't want to think about how much work must have gone into taking the original Sarien source code and turning it into a ScummVM compatible engine. Lots and lots of work, oh dear...

Not putting down the ScummVM team or Aquadran but I think the reason the Sarien code is working so well so quickly is actually because of the work the Sarien team put into it and it's good to see the ScummVM team won't let all that effort die.

[fingolfin]

Fully agreed, the compatibility of the new ScummVM AGI engine is only as good as it is because of the quality of Sarien. That said, we already have lots of plans to improve it, so stay tuned... and obviously, there are some immediate benefits, like a slew of new ports "for free", graphics scalers, etc. ...

[Curunir]

I wanted to ask about other Sierra titles that aren't supported by the Sarien/FreeSCI engines, that is, more recent 256-color titles such as later Quest for Glories, Space Quests, Conquests of the Longbow, etc.

I'm not hoping for forseeable ScummVM integration of those or even integration at all. I understand how much work all that is and that the coding team has other plans at hand.

However, I wanted to ask if there is a way, other than DosBox, to run those titles on modern machines and OS-s.

[DarkSoul]

I wanted to ask about other Sierra titles that aren't supported by the Sarien/FreeSCI engines, that is, more recent 256-color titles such as later Quest for Glories, Space Quests, Conquests of the Longbow, etc.

I'm not hoping for forseeable ScummVM integration of those or even integration at all. I understand how much work all that is and that the coding team has other plans at hand.

However, I wanted to ask if there is a way, other than DosBox, to run those titles on modern machines and OS-s.

As far as I'm aware all the Sierra adventure games used either the AGI or SCI engines, even late titles like Space Quest 6. The SCI engine was very similar to the Scumm engine in that it has different tiers, and each tier kinda represents a new graphics level. So ScummVM won't be doing these titles as they will be eventually covered by FreeSCI. For the games your probably after, your going to have to be really patient though, they still haven't got the first tier fully operational yet (stares at SQ3 CD )

[fisken uno]

I wanted to ask about other Sierra titles that aren't supported by the Sarien/FreeSCI engines, that is, more recent 256-color titles such as later Quest for Glories, Space Quests, Conquests of the Longbow, etc.

I'm not hoping for forseeable ScummVM integration of those or even integration at all. I understand how much work all that is and that the coding team has other plans at hand.

However, I wanted to ask if there is a way, other than DosBox, to run those titles on modern machines and OS-s.

As far as I'm aware all the Sierra adventure games used either the AGI or SCI engines, even late titles like Space Quest 6. The SCI engine was very similar to the Scumm engine in that it has different tiers, and each tier kinda represents a new graphics level. So ScummVM won't be doing these titles as they will be eventually covered by FreeSCI. For the games your probably after, your going to have to be really patient though, they still haven't got the first tier fully operational yet (stares at SQ3 CD )

FreeSCI? Lol. Forget it, they'll never fully support all the SCI versions. Ever. Dosbox does the job a whole lot better than FreeSCI ever will. And for the later Windowsbased FMV adventures I found that VirtualPC does the job pretty well actually. Better than emulating Windows 3.1 in Dosbox at least

[DarkSoul]

[FreeSCI? Lol. Forget it, they'll never fully support all the SCI versions. Ever. Dosbox does the job a whole lot better than FreeSCI ever will. And for the later Windowsbased FMV adventures I found that VirtualPC does the job pretty well actually. Better than emulating Windows 3.1 in Dosbox at least

That's mean. There not having the best time keeping their morale up as a project team. They don't have the kind of community support that ScummVM has. Not to mention the rumours of WinXP versions of the main Sierra quest series getting released has lost them alot of the interest they used to have. Also the fact that most people think like you do and don't think they can do it. Kinda demoralising when most people think their useless .

For example, I bet your reaction wouldnt be so positive if it was FreeSCI intending to take over the Sarien AGI engine. In fact most people wouldnt take it seriously at all

[fisken uno]

For example, I bet your reaction wouldnt be so positive if it was FreeSCI intending to take over the Sarien AGI engine. In fact most people wouldnt take it seriously at all

As a matter of fact you're right I wouldn't take it seriously at all. But hey... I mean, I remember when the FreeSCI project started several years ago and I was very excited. A new project is supposed to be buggy, right? Well, but it's still extremely buggy. At least on the Windows platform it is. Dosbox all the way, baby.

The only good thing the FreeSCI people could do right now would be to join the ScummVM team Cabal deja vu, eh?

[Collector]

I don't understand why people dismiss DOSBox so fast. It runs All of the Sierra AGI games and almost all of the SCI games quite easily. Plus the development is very active. About the only SCI games that would be nice to have something else to run them in is the few Windows only SCI games and the Windows version of KQ6.

I must agree about FreeSCI, the project is, sadly near death. It doesn't help that the developers are Linux snobs that dismiss Windows users out of hand. When a non-Linux user ask for help, the only answer that they are likely to get is *nix terms that are meaningless to a Windows user.

I'm not trying to say anything about Linux users, this is not meant to be Linux bashing, but that is the attitude that the FreeSCI group comes across like.

Two of the most successful projects are truly cross platform -- DOSBox and ScummVM. The main developers of DOSBox are Linux users as are a number of the ScummVM team, but they don't shun Windows or MAC users and developers.

[fingolfin]

I don't understand why people dismiss DOSBox so fast. It runs All of the Sierra AGI games and almost all of the SCI games quite easily.

Personally, I dismiss it so fast because for me it's simply not fast (lame pun intended *g*). I.e. on non-intel machines, it's got a quite serious overhead, and especially newer games are simply unusably slow with it. In particular, none of them "run" for me.

That said, I deeply respect Dosbox for what it does, and if I was using an Intel machine, I probably would use it a lot more .

[LordHoto]

I don't understand why people dismiss DOSBox so fast. It runs All of the Sierra AGI games and almost all of the SCI games quite easily. Plus the development is very active. About the only SCI games that would be nice to have something else to run them in is the few Windows only SCI games and the Windows version of KQ6.

Well DosBox runs most DOS games, but in my experience it's quite slow. Ever tried games with higher res than 320x200/later DOS games in DosBox? A pain!

I must agree about FreeSCI, the project is, sadly near death. It doesn't help that the developers are Linux snobs that dismiss Windows users out of hand. When a non-Linux user ask for help, the only answer that they are likely to get is *nix terms that are meaningless to a Windows user.

Ever thought that they maybe don't use Windows and that's why they have no intention/possibility to help Windows users?

[fingolfin]

I must agree about FreeSCI, the project is, sadly near death. It doesn't help that the developers are Linux snobs that dismiss Windows users out of hand.

Uh... so because they prefer to use Linux, and simply have no Windows system at hand; and because due to this they have to rely on other people to help with the Windows support; and because apparently the Windows community has nobody willing/able to do precisely this... Because of all this, they are Linux snobs?

Wow, that's obviously strong logic .

When a non-Linux user ask for help, the only answer that they are likely to get is *nix terms that are meaningless to a Windows user.

Yeah, well, you'll be surprised to hear this, but it is kinda difficult for me as a Mac OS X user to support people on a Windows system, too, because, frankly, I simply have no idea how things might work on Windows. ScummVM is lucky because we have active people working on many different ports. But to blame FreeSCI for not being as lucky strikes me as highly unfair.

Maybe if you stopped complaining about how evil they are for not using Windows, and for not being Windows experts, and instead would step up to actively help them (not necessarily by coding, but maybe by finding and convincing some Windows devs to go and help 'em), maybe then your time would be better spent?

[DarkSoul]

When a non-Linux user ask for help, the only answer that they are likely to get is *nix terms that are meaningless to a Windows user.

These past few weeks I've been somewhat a naggy email correspondent to FreeSCI, trying to get my hands on a Win32 build. And even though I'm a Windows user, they were very helpful to me, and went out their way to get me the build. They have a Windows user on the development team, but he's nowhere near as active as the linux developers on the team. Therefore work gets done on FreeSCI, but not enough Win32 specific work. Therefore FreeSCI is very buggy on Win32. But they are aware of this and are trying their best to get it sorted. Last I checked they were trying to convince their last Win32 maintainer to come back and help kill those Win32 bugs.

[Adventureguy]

Personally, I dismiss it so fast because for me it's simply not fast (lame pun intended *g*). I.e. on non-intel machines, it's got a quite serious overhead, and especially newer games are simply unusably slow with it. In particular, none of them "run" for me.

I think you could change the speed via the cycles in the DOSbox-configuration file. DOSbox is as fast as you want it to be.