SIERRA On-Line Documentary

I remember playing the bootable version of King’s Quest 1 (XT 4.77mhz with a Hercules Card using phix -b IIRC). The save option never worked for me, so I had to play it through without dying to finish it. Took many, many tries.
 
Sierra... a time long ago when you had to read, think, and type :ROFL:

'put paper bin' - nothing happens
'place paper bin' - nothing happens
'throw paper in bin' - the paper is thrown in the bin

'light paper' - nothing happens
'burn paper' - nothing happens
'set paper alight' - paper starts burning

:laugh::laugh:
 
Nemoneiros said:
Sierra... a time long ago when you had to read, think, and type :ROFL:

'put paper bin' - nothing happens
'place paper bin' - nothing happens
'throw paper in bin' - the paper is thrown in the bin

'light paper' - nothing happens
'burn paper' - nothing happens
'set paper alight' - paper starts burning

:laugh::laugh:
Click to expand...
I always ended up rage quitting because of that.
 
cguy said:
I remember playing the bootable version of King’s Quest 1 (XT 4.77mhz with a Hercules Card using phix -b IIRC). The save option never worked for me, so I had to play it through without dying to finish it. Took many, many tries.
Click to expand...
Serias?
that's one heck of an achievement, KQ1 loved to kill you around every corner.
Stand on the wrong side of the rock before pushing it? squish
tap the wrong direction for a microsecond while on a ledge? splat
 
Urist said:
Serias?
that's one heck of an achievement, KQ1 loved to kill you around every corner.
Stand on the wrong side of the rock before pushing it? squish
tap the wrong direction for a microsecond while on a ledge? splat
Click to expand...
Just thinking it was the "dark souls like" experience
 
Urist said:
Serias?
that's one heck of an achievement, KQ1 loved to kill you around every corner.
Stand on the wrong side of the rock before pushing it? squish
tap the wrong direction for a microsecond while on a ledge? splat
Click to expand...

Exactly. I think I would play for about an hour or two, and then just walk one pixel off a stair in a cave and die.

When I upgraded to CGA, I had this weird graphics bug, where the screen wouldn't draw until I moved over an area (it starts off completely blue). This was for an entire generate of Sierra game engines. In retrospect, there must have been an issue with the "new screen" initial full screen blit from RAM to VRAM (probably using some non-standard memory write/copy mode), and then when I moved, they would only update the rectangle around the animated pieces of the screen for efficiency, and clearly that sub-screen copy worked.

Nevertheless I played through the game with that - basically walking around to paint the screen. The windy path in KQ3 down from the hill was the hardest part, since it's so easy to fall, and the ground only paints when you walk on it.

Fun times - I clearly had a lot more patience back then! :-)
 
You guys sweated too much.. do what I did when I came across a part I couldn't advance or was doing my patience in.

look for binary files in program directory... open up in text/hex editor, do some serious eyeball scanning.. there where often text hints or identifying names to assist. :cool:

Fun times early late 80s/ early 90s , my first personal PC, the trusty IBM 8080 XT.
Cost about R5000 in those days.:oops::rolleyes:
 
Kings Quest 3 the damn desert with Medusa that became an endless maze if you walked pretty much anywhere. Afaik you also needed an actual manual for the spells in the game which was infuriating as I just never had access to it for the longest time.

403192-king-s-quest-iii-to-heir-is-human-trs-80-coco-screenshot-in.png

Space Quest (1?) traversing this Tentacle thing to get to the berries. Took ages before it occurred to slow the game down

300px-Sq2_Root_Monster.png.
 
saor said:
Kings Quest 3 the damn desert with Medusa that became an endless maze if you walked pretty much anywhere. Afaik you also needed an actual manual for the spells in the game which was infuriating as I just never had access to it for the longest time.

View attachment 856581

Space Quest (1?) traversing this Tentacle thing to get to the berries. Took ages before it occurred to slow the game down

View attachment 856583.
Click to expand...

Yup, you needed the spell verses from the manual.

Tentacle thing is from Space Quest 2. I loved the SQ series, KQ series and Heroes Quest series the most.
 
cguy said:
Yup, you needed the spell verses from the manual.

Tentacle thing is from Space Quest 2. I loved the SQ series, KQ series and Heroes Quest series the most.
Click to expand...
Never played Heroes Quest. That mech fight in SQ 3 was cool. SQ 1 started in the white spacechip corridors? Never finished that. SQ3 was the first quest game I played all the way through on my own steam.

sq3_robotfight.jpg
 
I loved all their games the Humour is so Out there
Fondly remember the time travel in Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers , it would label each time zone based on an episode of the game the past ones like Space Quest I and the future ones that didnt exist as well :) :p and some we wish did Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros -come to think of it you never actually paly in space quest IV-
 
OMW just realised you couldnt "drive" on the police quest highway without a numpad you had to drive left up left up to get 45deg on a laptop on a pc with kb this wasnt an issues
 
Some of the best games came from these guys, loved it. Still play some of then now and again on internet archives MS-Dos library of games
 
saor said:
Never played Heroes Quest. That mech fight in SQ 3 was cool. SQ 1 started in the white spacechip corridors? Never finished that. SQ3 was the first quest game I played all the way through on my own steam.

View attachment 856613
Click to expand...
Yup, SQ1 started in the corridors on the space ship that was about to explode.

SQ3 had some good mini games. Astroduck as well IIRC.
 
Sierra games taught me to type. My first was Space Quest II which was amazing compared to the other games I'd played.

I remember getting a copy of King's Quest IV without the manual. I debug.com dumped the exe and wrote down anything that looked readable (basically a manual strings command).

Imagine my joy when I typed in "bobalu" for page 3, line 1, word 2 or whatever and it worked (every time). Later I realised it was probably Roberta Williams' nickname that she built in as a backdoor for herself.

Space Quest 5 had better copy-protection (nothing readable in the game files). I had some memory-resident utility I forget the name of that activiated if you pressed both shift keys at the same time. It paused whatever was running and let you look through the RAM.

After a few minutes of paging I found a sequence of 5 digit ASCII numbers right next to each other. They turned out to be the co-ordinates of the places you had to visit (in order). I think you had to use one twice but that was easy to figure out.
 
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