Sierra Classic Gaming – Series – King’s Quest. AKA: King’s Quest II+ VGARelease: December 3, 2. Latest: Version 3. September 1, 2. 01. Summary: “The King’s Quest II: Romancing the Stones remake follows in the tradition of AGDI’s King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown remake, containing updated graphics and the familiar Sierra Point- and- Click interface system. But this time there is also an added storyline, deeper plot, fleshed- out characters, clever puzzles, enhanced artwork, music, atmosphere, depth, culture, and more – basically, the whole nine yards!” – AGD Interactive. Technology. UK - Gaming Landmarks - King's Quest. Game Profile. Year: 1. Original platform: IBM PCjr. Brief description: Adventure game. Number of players: One. King's Quest VII is different from the previous King's Quest games in terms of structure. Rosella is somewhat rebellious. Edgar is the Prince of Etheria who had previously appeared in King's Quest IV. King's Quest IV - The Peril's of Rosella was the first computer game I ever bought. Space Quest I, II, III, IV Kings Quest I, II, III, IV, V, VI Black Cauldron Maniac Mansion Monkey Island 1 & 2---- & I finished the lot of. Sir Graham faces dire peril even before he. Once Gwydion has managed. King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. Seeing Princess Cassima in peril in the magic mirror. King’s Quest II+ VGA Release: December 3, 2002 Latest: Version 3.1 on September 1. Developers/contributors: Sierra On- Line. The story of King's Quest is not just the story of a computer game. It is the story of a software company (Sierra On- line) founded by Ken and Roberta Williams. The couple married in 1. Los Angeles. Ken was nineteen years old, and his bride Roberta was even younger at the age of eighteen. Despite being a computer programmer, Ken found it necessary to take on freelance work in addition to his full- time job to support his wife and family (the couple's first son, D. J., was born in 1. Roberta did her part to bolster the family finances, working as a computer operator. In 1. 97. 9, Ken left his full time job to start his own software company, Online Systems. He was reportedly working on a taxation program for a customer's mainframe computer system when he came across a copy of William Crowther's 1. Colossal Cave Adventure. He borrowed a computer terminal, and took the game home to show Roberta. His wife had a passion for fairy tales and stories of all kinds, and he thought (rightly as it turned out) that she would find the game interesting. She subsequently tried to find other computer adventure games to play, without success. Undaunted, she decided to write her own game. Her first foray into game creation was called Mystery House, and was based on the work of crime writer Agatha Christie. The game's main character finds themself locked inside an old and apparently abandoned Victorian mansion with a number of other characters, who (probably somewhat predictably) begin falling victim to an unknown murderer. The player's character must identify the murderer before they themselves become a victim. Although Roberta had come up with the story for the game, she felt that it would be more engaging for the player if the game had a graphical element rather than just being text- based. With that in mind she produced some preliminary sketches. She realised, however, that she would not be able to write the game's program code herself. She knew she had to somehow persuade Ken to get involved. The first games produced by Ken and Roberta Williams would therefore be targeted primarily at the Apple II personal computer. There were no commercially available graphic drawing programs around at the time. The solution, or at least part of the solution, came in the form of the Versawriter, an innovative piece of hardware manufactured by Versa Computing of Newbury Park, California. The drawing was then covered with a transparent plastic overlay. King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride was. Want games like Kings Quest 7 for Nintendo 3DS? They must find a way to return Rosella to normal and find her true love, save Eldritch from the threat of the evil sorceress Malicia, and get back to their kingdom. Attached to the bed of the device was a jointed arm with an electronic position sensor at one end of it. The sensor could be moved freely over the drawing outline, enabling the user to produce a digitized version of their drawing. The software provided with the device allowed the user to perform a number of useful tasks, such as changing the background and foreground colours, filling in enclosed areas of the drawing with a solid colour, rescaling the drawing, creating shaded areas, and even adding text. In short, it included many of the basic features to be found in a modern computer graphics software package. The functionality provided was certainly sufficient to fulfill the Williams' requirements, and came at a price (a few hundred dollars) that they could afford. Images were drawn with a white foreground colour on a black background, and were stored as vector graphics rather than bitmapped images. Additional information about each scene was provided using on- screen text. The player was still required to enter simple text commands in order to interact with the game, in the same manner as for purely text- based computer role- playing games. The real innovation in terms of programming was the code written by Ken Williams, which had to provide the game's underlying logic and render the game's graphics. The lessons learned in creating the software for Mystery House would later lead to the development by Sierra On- Line (as they would become known) of a series of increasingly sophisticated game engines. The game sold for just under twenty- five dollars, and was packaged in a Ziploc bag containing a five- and- a- quarter inch floppy disk and a printed instruction sheet. Copies of the game were available in software stores throughout the Los Angeles County area, and this first Online Systems game is estimated to have achieved sales of approximately ten thousand copies. Encouraged by their success, Ken and Roberta Williams announced that this was just the first of a series of games for the Apple II personal computer, for which they chose the name Hi- Res Adventures. The game was called Wizard and the Princess, and the game's story, set in the imaginary kingdom of Serenia, reflected her lifelong love of fairy tales. The format of the game was otherwise identical to that of Mystery House, with players required to enter simple text commands. The major innovation was the use of colour, despite the fact that the Apple II could only display six colours. The user could be fooled into thinking that far more colours were present on the screen thanks to the use of a process known as dithering, in which adjacent pixels are displayed using two different colours to create the impression of a third colour. The new game was released later in the same year as Mystery House (1. Ziploc bag containing a five- and- a- quarter inch floppy disk and a printed instruction sheet. Wizard and the Princess was even more successful than Mystery House, and reportedly sold around sixty thousand copies. They also opened their first official offices in Oakhurst, but changed the name of the company to Sierra On- Line following the discovery that the name Online Systems was already being used by another company. By the end of 1. 98. Full text of 'Kings Quest Collection Series Manual' See other formats. Share your gamer memories, help others to run the game or comment anything you'd like. If you have trouble to run King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, read the abandonware guide first! Download Kings Quest Collection . A shipwrecked prince must find his way across a series of islands in search of a princess in peril. King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella was released in 1988. Besides improved resolution on its 16-color EGA graphics, it is also one of the first PC games that support a sound card. In King's Quest IV, we will take on the. Hi- Res Adventure series, culminating in The Dark Crystal, based on Jim Henson's animated fantasy film of the same name, and produced in collaboration with Jim Henson. In terms of gameplay, the games all followed more or less the same format. The Hi- Res Adventure series was so successful that Sierra had to recruit additional staff to cover the increased workload. Perhaps just as significantly, Sierra was beginning to attract the attention of major players in the computer industry. Target platforms included the IBM Personal Computer, the Atari ST, and the Commodore 6. IBM were meanwhile developing their PCjr personal computer, which was intended primarily for home and educational use. They approached Sierra On- Line to develop a game to help to show off the hardware capabilities of their new computer, which boasted one hundred and twenty- eight kilobytes (1. B) of memory, a graphics chip that offered six display modes and could display up to sixteen different colours simultaneously, and a programmable sound generator chip developed by Texas Instruments that included three separate tone generators. The game put forward by Sierra On- Line for the PCjr was Roberta Williams' most ambitious project to date - King's Quest. Incredible as it may sound given the high screen resolutions available today, the version initially created for the IBM PCjr used the computer's 3. EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adapter) mode. Realising that the program code used for the HI- Res Adventure series of games would not be up to the task, Sierra's programmers created a new game engine for King's Quest, which they named the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). The AGI game engine controlled the game's logic, rendered the game's graphics, and played the game's sound. Although initially designed around the hardware capabilities of the PCjr, it was also designed to be platform independent. This turned out to be a sound strategy on the part of Sierra On- Line. IBM's PCjr personal computer turned out to be a commercial failure, mainly due to its high price tag (by comparison with other personal computers of the day) and poorly designed keyboard. This would certainly have been the most appropriate resolution given the IBM PCjr's hardware specification, but all the documentation I have come across so far suggests that Sierra's AGI game engine was based on a resolution of 1. There is no doubt in my mind however, having viewed video footage of the game actually running on an IBM PCjr, that the resolution being displayed must be 3. The anomaly can be explained if you assume (since the game engine produces vector graphics rather than bitmapped images) that all of the screen coordinates have their x- values increased by a factor of two before the images are displayed. If anyone knows differently, maybe they could email me. At any rate, since vector graphics can cause considerable screen flicker when drawn directly to the screen (especially on slower hardware) the image vector information is used to create a bitmapped image which is temporarily stored in a memory buffer. The resulting bitmap is then copied into the screen display memory, and the completed image is displayed on the screen without flicker. This process is known as a bit- block transfer (sometimes called a . It takes its inspiration from the fairytales and other stories that Roberta so enjoyed. The game's story is set in the kingdom of Daventry, which is ruled over by King Edward the Benevolent. The kingdom's fortunes are somewhat dependent upon three artifacts that are invested with special powers - a magic mirror that can be used to foretell the future, a shield that protects the wearer from harm, and a treasure chest that contains an inexhaustible supply of gold. These artifacts have been used in various ways to maintain the security and continued prosperity of the kingdom. At the time the story begins, however, the three items are no longer in the possession of the royal family of Daventry. An evil sorcerer has obtained the magic mirror, a mysterious dwarf has gained possession of the shield, and a wicked witch has stolen the treasure chest.
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