[Coco] NEW GAMES (kinda sorta) FOR THE COCO 3!!!!

Ken Carlin carlin at nauticom.net
Mon Jul 3 19:08:43 EDT 2006


But first, a little back story...

It all started when I was nosing around the nightly snapshot of NitrOS9 on
nitros9.org.  I never really looked that closely before, but this time I
wanted to really try to understand what was going on.  I wanted to compile
a build under Windows, just to see if I could.  That's actually a whole
other story which I intend to tell later.

Anyway, I saw something interesting under a directory labeled "3rd party"
or something similar.  There were directories that looked like the games
RS used to sell.  Specifically, King's Quest III and Leisure Suit Larry.
They had been disassembled and all the relevant files were there to look
at.  That wasn't all.  There were two other directories that interested me
- KQ1 and KQ2.  Could these be King's Quest 1 and 2?  Only one way to find
out.

I compiled the KQ1 directory (actually, I compiled ALL the directories,
but the KQ1 directory is of interest right now) and pulled the files over
to the Coco.  Then I tried to fire up the game.  No dice - I got on out of
memory error.  I left it at that, but I also asked Boisy if he knew what
was up.  He told me that he remembered having KQ2 actually running, and
not KQ1, so I tried it next.

SUCCESS!!

Yes people, the Coco can run King's Quest 2.

Boisy gave me further guidance.  It seems that he realized many moons ago
that the Coco was capable of running quite a number of the old Sierra
adventures.  He even reported it to the list, but no one went anywhere
with it.

Until now...

I decided to retry King's Quest 1, but I used the data from a CD
compilation I had instead of what was at nitros9.org.  Except for 1 minor
glitch (so far) IT ALSO WORKS!

I pressed on.  Next up: Space Quest 1.  Can you say 3 for 3?

Sadly, that's it though.  At least for now.  I've learned quite a bit
about Sierra adventure games in the past few days, and I suspect that the
Coco may be able to run a few other games, but getting to that point may
be difficult or impossible.  I'm willing to try, but I'd like help in
doing it.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  There ARE most likely other games that can work
right now, but I haven't tried them yet.  They're fan-based games, written
by people you use tools available today to recreate the old games.  You
even know one person who's started a game - Boisy.

So, to sum up, the Coco 3 with 512K (and for right now either a hard drive
or 720K floppy drive (I'm working on figuring out how to divide all the
files between multiple floppies)) is capable of running:

King's Quest 1
King's Quest 2
King's Quest 3
Leisure Suit Larry
Space Quest 1

And yes, I've made the files available as 360K disk images at:
http://www.rkratt.com/~coco3

The filenames should be self-explanatory.  Like I said earlier, for right
now you'll need either a hard drive or a 720K floppy since all the files
must reside on the same media until I can figure out how to split up
things.

I should point out that there are a few hiccups with the games.  King's
Quest 1 has a scripting glitch that effectively will end the game if you
bow before the king.  So the solution for now is don't do that!  And Space
Quest will display some sort of debug menu if you press a lower-case "s"
at all, so the solution is to either type in all-caps, or just type in
cap-S.  The debug window is easily cleared and doesn't crash the game
though.

When I get the chance, I'll also create a web site that details all that I
know about getting the games running under the Coco.  With some help, I'm
hopeful we can add some titles (specifically Police Quest and possibly
Space Quest 2 for instance).




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