Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter AGI Help

(recorded from Sarien)

Space Quest AGIUpdate (none)

Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter'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
1.5 MB Hard drive space
Supports: Joystick, Hard Disk (Key Disk)

Audio Problems
- Music only comes over PC Speaker

Graphics Bugs
- Garbled Text

Extras
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter AGI Manual (PDF file) [1.06 MB]
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter UHS File (ZIP file) [3.46 KB]
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter Walkthrough
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter Point List
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter AGI Cheats
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter AGI Easter Eggs
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter Coupons
- Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter AGI Demo (DEMOPAC2) (ZIP file) 225 KB]
- Janitorial Times (SpaceQuest.net) Forum
- SHP Space Quest Series Help Forum
- Find it on eBay
- Google

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 NAGI or Sarien. With NAGI you'll hear all three MIDI voices and even have limited mouse support within your AGI games.

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