How to get King's Quest I - IV AGI
to run in Windows 2000 or XP

by Collector

NOTICE: The following information is now dated. DOSBox is now, by far, the best way to play Sierra's AGI games. If you use "machine=tandy" you will get the 3 voice PCjr/Tandy music. ScummVM can also be used, now that it has merged with Sarien, but its sound emulation is off.

The Sierra AGI games (King's Quest I, II, III,and the rare AGI version of IV) should run fine on most Windows 2000/XP/Vista machines. You get the one MIDI voice beeping through the case speaker just like it did when these games were new. For those that have no problem running these games, you can hear all three MIDI voices through your sound card with a patch by Anders Olsson, agi-mid05.zip (12 kb). This works for all versions of Windows, but 2K and XP users will also have to run the games with VDMSound to hear it.

However, some of the newer graphics cards might garble the text in these games and make it unreadable. This problem will occur on Windows 95/98/ME as well. To get around this you can run the games with a third party DOS emulator like DOSBox or one of the new third party AGI interpreters such as NAGI or Sarien. With NAGI you'll hear all three MIDI voices and even have limited mouse support within your AGI games.

Here is how to run Sierra's AGI games with NAGI:

  • Download nagi_-_2_06.zip (151 kb) and unzip it into a new folder of your choice (create a folder in the same SIERRA folder where your games are installed. Call it NAGI or whatever you want to name it.)
     
  • Download SDL which is a free generic library, SDL-1.2.5a-win32.zip (94 kb) and unzip it to your NAGI folder (NAGI requires it to run)
     
  • Now just drag and drop each of your AGI game folders into your NAGI folder
     
  • Open your NAGI folder and double click on "N.EXE" or just "N" if you have file extensions set to be hidden. You will be presented with a list of all your AGI games in your NAGI folder. Just scroll down the list with your arrow keys to select the game you want to play and press ENTER.

You can right click and drag a shortcut from "n.exe" to your desktop for easy access to your games.

NOTE: By default NAGI does not run full screen, but you can get it to, if you open "NAGI.INI" (a file that is in the NAGI folder) and look for this entry:

; full screen mode
; available options: 0, 1
; default option: 0
full_screen=0

Change full_screen=0 to full_screen=1 and save your changes.

Or you can select "n.exe" run in 640 x 480 screen resolution from the Compatibility mode tab. This will allow it to still run in a window, but make it fill most of the screen.

 


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