Collector

I have encountered people who formed attitudes about DOSBox from years ago with much slower machines and when DOSBox had much lower compatibility and never re-evaluated DOSBox. It is not unusual for people to have never touched it since. This includes pre-Intel Mac users and retro hardware freaks. PPC did not have access to the dynamic core and DOSBox was generally pretty slow on it. Many retro hardware freaks have not touched DOSBox since 0.58 and think the sound is crap. Sound accuracy is very important to Qbix and the quality of DOSBox's sound shows this. Even ScummVM uses audio code lifted from DOSBox. More often than not, there is nothing you have change with DOSBox's audio settings, but many don't realize that you have to use the game's setup to get optimal audio, just as you had to on a real DOS PC. Case in point. Many of the SCI0 to SCI1.1 games shipped with Roland MT-32 set as default. Play this through AdLib and it will sound like holy hell. As MI notes, DOSBox is incredibly easy to use once you grasp the concepts of mounting. In fact, for many games it can be as simple as putting a shortcut to DOSBox on the desk top and dragging and dropping a game's EXE onto the shortcut.

I beg to differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCu3txSxzaQ

This could be one of the best arguments for death scenes in games. What would a Hitchcock or any thriller, suspense, film noir, horror movie be if there was never any threat of death. Or really a majority of the film genres. A death free/unlosable game is like being a toddler playing a game with a parent who always lets the child win. Possibly fun for the child, but boring for anyone else.

Sound like there are some childhood memories at work there. The darkness and distant hoof sounds in the catacombs in KQ6 got to me the first few times.

Exactly. It is all of these reasons that make DOSBox my very first choice over ScummVM. This does not mean that I have no use for ScummVM, just that there needs to be some extra compelling reason to choose it over DOSBox, like to get the Win version of KQ6 on x64 or some of the Coktel Visions CD games to play without issue, given Coktel's odd use of MSCDEX. And I was more than a little ticked at some of the ScummVM team over those same incidents, too. They were also upset with the SCI Programmer's Wiki for republishing the SCI Documentation from the old Free SCI group, in spite of the fact that its license explicitly gives permission to do so. They were pretty high handed in trying taking over the SCI resources and communities. This after they had reached out for help to the very same communities when first adding SCI support.

You want Tandy sound for the AGI games, not PC speaker. It is three voice music with noise channel. That is what ScummVM does not handle well. The noise channel was used for sound effects like running water, footsteps, etc. As I posted earlier, ScummVM will turn a babbling brook into a single piano "thud". Not that it matters, but it sounds like you formed an opinion of DOSBox early on. Two things have happened since. The performance of DOSBox has improved considerably since then and PCs have gotten a lot faster. So for all but the most demanding games few things have performance issues these days. Even most of those are easily fixable with a few tweaks. I will concede that performance could still be an issue for non PC hardware like handhelds.

I am not involved with the remake, but I believe it will have fewer dead ends and random deaths.

It matters more with the SCI games than AGI, but over time even their SCI handling is better than what it was. Their early SCI support tried to force their custom "antidithering". It is easier to get the proper sound in DOSBox. ScummVM has different audio settings divided between the global settings and game specific, each spread between different tabs and it can be easy to have them conflicting with each other. And the ScummVM defaults are often wrong. For non-PC versions of AGI ScummVM is certainly the way to go, when it is supported. For phones and tablets it might also be the right solution, given their lower power and lack of mouse/keyboard, but we are talking about PCs. AGI games have fewer issues in ScummVM than SCI, but it still takes some liberties with them. Even the sound is messed up. Some may prefer having the three voice music turned into a cheap AdLib piano, but it also turns the noise channel into a single piano "thud" sound. As to colors, that has been improved and now is closer to the EGA pallet, but for years it carried over from Sarien defaulting to the Amiga pallet, which produced rather odd colors with the PC versions. As to performance issues with DOSBox, I believe that you are on Mac, are you not, or am I misremembering? Pre Intel Macs did not have the dynamic core available. And audio with the earlier the SCI0 and SCI1 games, Sierra had MT-32 as default for the audio, which sounds like crap with AdLib. To get proper sound in DOSBox it is more a matter of properly configuring the game's audio settings, not DOSBox's. You could say that some of it comes down to personal preferences, which 'to each his own' applies. However, I'll admit that I was mostly being irritated at Capn_Ascii's pissing on my work. My task was to repackage Gold Rush! to run on modern PCs while maintaining the integrity of the original experience. That was important to them and the MacNeill bros.

NAGI is by Nick Sonneveld of the AGI Development Site. It was great when there were no other ways to play AGI games on newer hardware. ScummVM might be OK for the non PC AGI games, but DOSBox gives better results. About the only thing that ScummVM has over DOSBox for AGI games is adding quirky mouse support. And for those that are too lazy to figure out just how easy DOSBox is to use, it is a moot point for the new release of Gold Rush!. It is properly preconfigured for the technically impaired.

Perhaps mostly the VIEWs?

The issue is not where it was sent out for outsourcing, but that it was outsourced. While outsourcing is not a certainty of poor quality, it often has. New developers or outsiders may "get" the project, but it has also lead to atrocities like MCL and BOB.

Nothing that I ever consider for a comedy. BTW, I just noticed your location. I thought you were in Denver.

I have noticed that with the current practice of TV seasons lasting only about a month that even shows I have been very drawn to I have started to lose interest before the next season begins.

The only complaint that I have with the parser is when it is badly implemented or incomplete. It drives me nuts if the vocabulary is so sparse that you have to play the "guess what word I am thinking of now" game with the developer. That breaks immersion. It should recognize all synonyms and variants of the word in question. I would go as far as to have it recognize all alternate spellings. Other than that, I can see no reason that the parser could not find a place in a modern game.

Me too.

One of my favorite Stargate SG1s

Always take Omnipedia with a very large grain of salt. It contains quite a few errors. It took someone I know a long time to get the owner to change his entry on the fallen knight in the land of the dead in KQ6. He absolutely insisted that his name was Shahrazad just because of Jane Jensen's poem that mentioned her name. There were a number of insiders there that have all pretty much corroborated the course of events on the sale of Sierra. There was a transitional period that passed control from Williams to CUC.

I agree with much of what you have said, but the "spear-headed KQ8" suggests that you are unfamiliar with the history of the development of the game. The game was just under development when Sierra was wrested from the control of the Williams. Roberta's influence over the game kept slipping all the time. Ken Williams on his site has related much of what went on during that time. http://www.sierragamers.com/Forum/bbs/Topic.3846.530202 Your point may be better made with KQ6, where up-and-comer Jane Jensen put her mark on the game to the point that it was more of a Jane Jensen game than Roberta's.

The reviews were salvaged from the Wayback. If you want to do a review, write it up and get it to me.

This is what burned.

That is not what burned. It was an old barn that was where they had TSN/INN that burned.

Yes, AGI games are easy to set up in DOSBox, but I have found that some that can do not optimally configure DOSBox and many simply do not know how or want to learn. To market a DOS game in this era, the game needs to be packaged in a way that less technically capable people have no problems running it. The installer will install the game to the hard drive, automatically configured to run optimally in DOSBox. It is set to run from a launcher that I wrote to make the experience more like a native windows game. I also wrote a frontend to change some basic DOSBox settings.

http://sciwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Sierra_Game_List

Didn't you have the option in KQ2 to kill the lion o get past it, but didn't get the points you got by choosing the non-violent path?

Looks like it is intended to fill in between Ent and TOS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W1_8IV8uhA