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

[John Donaldson]

Thanks for all the hard work. I downloaded all of the files. Now to get 
them all up and running on my COCO3 OS9 Lvl2 emulator.

John Donaldson



Guillaume Major wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>
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>
>  
>


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