[Coco] Sierra games revisited, a new game and a Christmas demo!

[Guillaume Major]

Hi guys!

About a month ago, I was wondering why Leisure Suit Larry for the coco had a 
different file format than King's Quest III. I was able to load King's Quest 
III in any AGI editor but not Leisure Suit Larry. So I decided to take a 
closer look to the LSL files with an hex editor and I discovered that this 
game was using the resources format of version 3 of the AGI interpreter for 
the PC while using the version 2 file structure.

Version 2 uses 4 files to keep track of the resources in the vol files: 
logDir (for logic), picDir (for pictures), viewDir (for sprites) and sndDir 
(for sound) while version 3 combines the 4 files with a header which 
contains the offset of each type of resource within the file. Version 2 uses 
a 5 bytes header for storing resources while version 3 uses a 7 bytes 
header. The 2 extra bytes are used for compression. So when loading LSL, the 
AGI editors expected a 5 bytes header because the game was detected as a 
version 2. That's why I was unable to load it in any AGI editor.

The interpreter in LSL (v2.072) is better than the one in KQ3 (v2.023) and 
supports a few more features like the PLOT command for pictures and 
compression! The PLOT command was used in many games I adapted for the coco 
and I had to get rid of them to make it work with the KQ3 interpreter. 
Result: less detailed pictures. The LSL interpreter can display all the 
pictures from the original games. And the best feature: compression. 
Compression allowed me to make 360K versions of King's Quest 4, GoldRush!, 
ManHunter and fit KQ1 on one disk!

All games have been converted to use the new AGI interpreter and their 
original pictures. The Space Quest intro song sounds better with this 
interpreter.

Also, I have adapted the excellent fan made game Space Quest 0 : Replicated 
for the coco. This game is very close to the spirit of the original Space 
Quest games and is very fun to play. I recommend it to every Space Quest 
fan.

That's not all! I also adapted the Christmas Card demo from Sierra. Well, 
the animation is constantly interrupted by the music because of the 
limitation of the coco interpreter but at least you can enjoy the music. 
Just in time (barely!) before Christmas!

You can download all the games at:

http://goyim.dyndns.org:8080/coco/Sierra.Games

Merry Christmas!!!
Ho! Ho! Ho!

Guillaume