3:20 there is a great little easter egg (or maybe just in joke) about the hand painted art in one of the space quest games that shows one of the painters painting directly on the screen of her monitor. for some reason, it always cracked me up when i saw that as a kid. i think the picture was from one of the boxes or manuals, but its been too long for me to remember exactly where i saw it
I think it was in the Space Quest V manual! Or possibly the hint book. There is a picture of one of the artists drawing directly on her monitor. And another picture of an actor dressed as Roger about to be set on fire, or hoisted onto a photo copier.
The error at 0:25 is indeed specific to running in 16 colors. The EGA drivers, when asked, will gladly tell the game it's running in 16 colors. SQ5, but *only* the CD version with the colored cursors, and the PC-98 version have this in the timepod screen's init: (if (not (Btst fIsVGA)) (Load PICTURE 602)) It's preloaded but never actually used. The PC-98 version actually has it, revealing it's a version of the time warp as seen from the cockpit, normally picture 529, with the colors switched around. In lieu of palette rotation, the PC-98 version would cycle between the two... but only if fIsVGA is unset! If it is running in 256 colors, it'll try to use palette rotation still. The PC CD release has only one of these three parts.
You gotta paint your own picture, in your head. I recall I've played those games on Hercules with software CGA emulator, on amber CRT. I have FOND memories, all the same.
You might think that's bad, but i would legit play all those if not for the illegible text and crashing. That says a lot because I have sworn off games and haven't played a game since 2013.
Initially, the Space Quest 1 remake was released in the EGA version. To get the VGA version, there was a coupon inside. You could pre-order the VGA version, then send in Disk 3, and they would send you the VGA version. For a while, the EGA version was the only way you could play it. It was a bit less, though.
Somehow I missed that, and I did follow the Space Quest 1 remake pretty closely, ordering it as soon as I could. It was more like the 50's sci-fi remake! The EGA from it looks pretty good. But then I was one of the sorry souls who played every Sierra game until SQ3 and KQ4 on a 4.77 MHz XT clone with CGA. I was pretty glad when they finally switched to the palette that included black instead of blue for space. :) I do remember a similar situation with Monkey Island (1) EGA.I had to buy the EGA version and then spend another $10, if I remember, to upgrade to VGA.
I gotta say, this makes me feel strangely nostalgic, not for these version so Space Quest which I never played, but for the weird color palettes. Cyan and magenta are the colors of my childhood.
Oh yes, I had to play all Sierra games on Hercules! SQ1, SQ2, SQ3, KQ1, KQ2, KQ3, LSL1, LSL2 & LSL3! It actually was not so bad (better than not playing them at all), also the pop-up command prompt was quite handy! But in a few places, especially in LSL2, LSL3 and SQ3 it was nearly impossible to recognize the important items on the screen. Luckily I could eventually play the newer SCI games like SQ4, SQ5 and LSL5 & LSL6 on VGA. Btw, you could try to turn down the "Details" in SQ4, if I remember correctly this disables scrolling - maybe it won't crash with unsupported drivers then.
Thanks, man! Yeah, we actually tried lowering the detail slider all the way to the bottom. It still crashes. So it's a problem with the "changing rooms" code itself. Some of the dudes on my Discord were trying to see if they could swap out the code for the regular room change code (which DOES work), but it's tough - and they'd have to change it for every single room that does a scroll.
My first computer was an Amstrad PC1512 and I played the original AGI games in black and white since colour looked godawful on that CGA monitor (I learned decades later that the same machine actually had a unique graphic driver for the later SCI games to make them look good, but by then I had an Amstrad PC5286 with VGA). The upshot of this is that I am hugely nostalgic for the AGI games in monochrome, but most of all the Manhunter games. In proper colour, they are gory and garish like a 1970's Romero movie... but in black and white they have a really grim film noir vibe.
Ah the CGA version of Space Quest III. It took me as a kid about two days before I tried to copy over the Amstrad 16 color driver from Kings Quest IV to my Space Quest Floppy. Low and behold it works. The only difference I could tell is on phebot the monster arms didn't move.
The first version of SQ1 I played was the EGA version of the remake, and boy was it ugly. I tried the “copy a 256 color driver from another game” trick but of course it didn’t work.
Hmm I remember playing sq4 back in the day and it always crashed at the timepod while on my buddies PC fine...this video brought back those feelings hard!!
It'd be cool if these modern High Def special edition rereleases of games like Monkey Island let you toggle between all these graphics card/automatic rescale options. I remember the PC monitor we had in the late 80s had a button that could change the colour display - as I recall it could limit it to intense reds blues and greens, or shades of greys, or a ghastly green and black. I don't know why this was an option because when left alone it could display the full spectrum or whatever limited old game we installed, but It was fun to downgrade good graphics to shit on a whim - easier then quitting and going to the setup.
God, I really want to see as much of this running on my old Geforce card thru S-video as possible. Why? Well, to be thorough, of course, not to mention that hot Space Quest street cred that's in such hot demand these days. I still need to get a real CGA card to get CGA composite working, though, but boy do I want it. Oh, and I also got an Apple IIc recently, so you'd better believe I'm getting as much Sierra merch as I can for that. Can't wait to see how well I can "speedrun" Space Quest I and II on the starchiest potato you can them on!
That's a weird comparison but I'll take it. 😅 Also, I don't know if you saw, but I played through the whole game in 4 color CGA during a marathon livestream: ru-vid.com9qInUh3c8zs
I have a video about that as well. 😁 Also, in my King's Quest VI video, I have a segment about how we did a deep-dive into just why the Sierra games on the Amiga performed so badly, and why KQ6 was the exception... because it wasn't made by Sierra at all. 😊
Woah. This was really interesting. I wonder if any source code was ever put out there? You could definitely make super drivers to cover all these games if so.
Nope, no source code. Everything was, rather infamously, destroyed when Sierra got sold off a half dozen times. Al Lowe kept his original code for Leisure Suit Larry and tried to auction it off on eBay, but Activision stepped in and told him to quit it.
@@spacequesthistorian (coughs in having the LSL1 AGI and SCI code, also LSL2, LSL3, and LSL5, plus KQ3, PQ1 AGI, Donald Duck, Black Cauldron, and test/design "applications" for AGI and SCI0) I don't have any source for video drivers. I have the IBM joystick, IBM keyboard, Tandy keyboard, and PC speaker source.
Well shit. I stand corrected, then! Everything was indeed destroyed by the companies that bought Sierra, but it seems some stuff survived after all. Most of the stuff we've been doing on the SQH Discord, however, has been through decompiling the game scripts in SCI Companion, and that takes a bit of "what's this for?" trial and error.
@@Kawa-oneechan That's a shame. A couple of years ago, I tried reverse engineering the AGI video drivers with the intention to make them run in 16 colors on the PC1512. But I didn't get very far...
pretty sure it looked like this for me when I ran it in Windows 3.1 I only discovered it didn't look like complete shit running it from dos edit: dear God why would you do this
You think that's bad - check out what we did to SQ1VGA: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9qInUh3c8zs.html (time skip link in the description)
