King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella AGI Help

(recorded from DOSBox)

King's Quest IV AGI Update (none)

King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella's original requirements:

8088 / 8086 or better CPU
VGA/EGA/Tandy (16 colors) or CGA (4 colors) or Hercules (2 colors)
256KB RAM
MS-DOS 2.11 or greater
1-1.5 MB Hard drive space
Supports: Joystick, Hard Disk

Audio Problems
- Music only comes over PC Speaker

Graphics Bugs
- Garbled Text

Game Specific Bugs
- KQ4 AGI Copy Protection
- Can't Climb the Whale's Tongue

Extras

Audio Problems

Problem - Music only comes over PC Speaker:
You get the one MIDI voice beeping through the case speaker. This is not a bug, this is the way the games were made. They did this when these games were new.

Solution 1:
Play the game in DOSBox. If you change dosbox.conf to set "machine=tandy" instead of "machine=vga" there will be 3 voice PCjr/Tandy music with a white noise channel. You can also get Tandy sound in Sierra's AGI games without having to emulate Tandy video mode if you run "sierra.com" with a "-t" after it in the game's directory, i.e.:

sierra.com -t

Solution 2:
Use a patch by Anders Olsson, agi-mid05.zip (12 kb). You will hear all three MIDI voices through your sound card. (2K and XP users will also have to run the games with VDMSound to hear it.)

Solution 3 (preferred):
Run the games with 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.

Graphics Bugs

Problem - Garbled Text:
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.

Solution #1 (preferred):
Run the game with DOSBox. You can hear all three MIDI voices if you select "machine=tandy" in the dosbox.conf.

Solution #2:
Run the games with one of the new third party AGI interpreters such as ScummVM, NAGI or Sarien. With these three interpreters you'll hear all three MIDI voices and even have limited mouse support within your AGI games.

Note: DOSBox and NAGI have the best sound emulation of all these solutions.

Game Specific Bugs

There are a couple of bugs the game has that are not speed dependent.

Problem - KQ4 AGI Copy Protection:
When the game starts

Solution #1:
When the game asks you for a word from the manual, press "Alt+D" and a screen will pop up with the version info. Press enter and at the prompt, type "MARBLE". The game will then start.

Problem - Can't Climb the Whale's Tongue:
The Whale's Tongue scene in King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella seems impossible to solve.

Solution:
Be patient and move slowly, saving often. Click here for a step by step imagehelp.

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