King's Quest port?

[+BoatofCar]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

[Tempest]

Probably because it required 128K minimum. I've heard rumors that someone had found a prototype of it on a disk but the disk was bad and didn't work. Just a rumor though.

 

Tempest

[atariksi]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

[a8isa1]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

 

OK, I'm asking Santa for ports of all the original ___ Quest games.

 

Since I've been bad this year next Christmas will be fine.

[Tempest]

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

How would that make it 'doable' on a 1.78 MHz Atari?

 

Tempest

[José Pereira]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

 

OK, I'm asking Santa for ports of all the original ___ Quest games.

 

Since I've been bad this year next Christmas will be fine.

 

O.k. but I talk with Santa and he said that if you do some good Things from now on he will give you Defender of the Crown in time for Christmas... problem is that he didn't said wich Christmas Year!...

 

 

O.k., talking serious, there is a Guy saying that it will have it working by Christmas, hope it is this year...

You can read some about this at AtariOnline, not many, but he is also looking for some help with the Music&Sounds.

 

 

 

Greets.

José Pereira.

Edited December 2, 2010 by José Pereira

[atariksi]

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

How would that make it 'doable' on a 1.78 MHz Atari?

 

Tempest

 

PC's 8088 uses more cycles/instruction than 6502 and hardly had any graphics coprocessing compared to Atari's ANTIC/GTIA. Memory (RAM) requirement may be more of an issue than speed if you target 48K Ataris as low-end.

[Hatta]

KQ1 on the apple II uses double hi-res graphics. That's 560x192. The 8-bit is limited to 320x192, isn't it?

[OldAtarian]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

 

CGA is still far in excess of what the A8 is capable of video wise and a 4.77mhz 8088/8086 is still faster than a 1.77mhz 6502 and ANTIC can't compare to a good video card in the PC.

Edited December 2, 2010 by OldAtarian

[candle]

8086 wasn't speed deamon, so 4.77 086 and 1.78 6502 might be comparable

issue here was memory requirements and resolution i suppose - not cpu speed

 

i would love to see any of sierra's adventures or lucas arts ones redid on a8

whatever it takes

[OldAtarian]

8086 wasn't speed deamon, so 4.77 086 and 1.78 6502 might be comparable

issue here was memory requirements and resolution i suppose - not cpu speed

 

i would love to see any of sierra's adventures or lucas arts ones redid on a8

whatever it takes

 

Memory would have been another issue. The PC probably would have at least 256k RAM to work with and the video card might have a few K of it's own.

Edited December 2, 2010 by OldAtarian

[candle]

also - disk access, and drive capacity

360k floppy is still twice as big as atari ones, and most games were distributed as SD or ED for compatibility

 

so, who does the porting?

[+Philsan]

I would prefer Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders or Maniac Mansion, that already exists for C64:

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D2928

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D1591

[candle]

You slept again in empty bed home...

alone...

again...

 

Maniac mansion, especially the day of the tentacle was something - especially redo with speech

[kool kitty89]

Given the release date and popular platforms of the time, the stranger thing is a lack of a C64 port.

Both cases may have been more of a memory issue. The only 8-bit platform it was ported to was the Apple II and I'm not sure what the minimum requirements were. (if it was designed to work with a 48/64k -with RAM disk- Apple, it should have been very feasible on the Atari -even without using sprites or color tricks, let alone C64)

Given the artifact colors in these screenshots: http://www.mobygames.com/game/kings-quest/screenshots

I think the Apple II version may require double highres graphics support, so not one of the older/unexpanded models.

 

Though I'd have thought that more frequent loading would facilitate working in less RAM. (let alone lower color depth at 2bpp rather than 4bpp of the PCJr original)

 

Probably because it required 128K minimum. I've heard rumors that someone had found a prototype of it on a disk but the disk was bad and didn't work. Just a rumor though.

 

Tempest

The original version was written specifically for the PCJr with the 16-color extended CGA modes (160x200x16 colors in this case), and unless it specifically required RAM expansion or the 128k model, that would imply it was intended to work within 64 kB, or more like 48kB rather as the video RAM was shared and even at the low res it used almost 16 kB. (OTOH the 128k model was the only one to include a floppy drive on the PCJr, so maybe it was aimed at that model specifically)

Still, on a character graphics based system like the A8 or C64, and with half the color depth (2bpp, though with indexed color) and tile/character mode graphics, that would stretch 48/64k a good bit further.

 

 

 

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

 

CGA is still far in excess of what the A8 is capable of video wise and a 4.77mhz 8088/8086 is still faster than a 1.77mhz 6502 and ANTIC can't compare to a good video card in the PC.

For some things CGA is more useful (and includes 640x200 monochrome and 80 column text -both supporting chroma disabled composite video for RGB like clarity on composite monitors and decent quality even in RF), but for games it's really limited compared to the hardware features of the A8 or C64 for that matter.

Best case would be with composite artifacting allowing a pseudo 160x200 16-color NTSC artifact mode (also going beyond the CGA palette limits and a lot of different pseudo palettes possible from the 2 320x200 modes -with 2 palette modes each- and 640x200 -all with 1 indexed color possible and thus 16 different pseudo palettes for each mode or 80 different 16 color pseudo palettes with some much more useful than others).

King's Quest was one of the games to take advantage of this though the RGB mode version looks pretty weak by comparison. (remember CGA only has 1 indexed color with the other 3 fixed to one of the default palettes -or always white in highres- or the 3rd 3-color palette that appears in RGB in the composite colorburst disabled modes -which are grayscale in composite- and unfortunately the indexed color is always the only one that can be black, so if you need black you have to stick with that)

There's the character modes, but those are ROM only for text unfortunately. (otherwise they'd be extremely useful for games using programmer defined character graphics -even if you had to limit yourself to 16 kB of CGA memory- not to mention character scrolling effects -especially in 8 column mode, or potential for composite artifacts of characters)

There was also the 160x100 16 color tweak mode as well which was the only way to really get full 16 color graphics in RGB, but limited to the low resolution.

 

Of course, the original King's Quest was not CGA, but PCJr specific using the expanded color modes with full 4bpp direct color of the CGA palette. (using the lower res 160x200 16 color mode in this case) Still all software driven drawing to a bare framebuffer though, no characters, no scrolling, no blitting, though it is packed pixels rather than planar like the ST. (though I think it may have inherited the funky interleaved scanline address organization of CGA, so that's a bit of a pain to get used to as well)

 

Given the nature of such graphic adventure games, they're not very rendering intensive as such with a static background drawn to the screen and a few (sometimes 1) moving object on-screen plus text. The C64 shouldn't have had any trouble managing a good conversion without any tricks (I think there's few enough objects to stick with hardware sprites as well), and the A8 would probably be pretty reasonable even without significant use of DLIs (maybe more so for sprites unless you dropped to a bitmap mode and software rendered or used character based objects, or a mix of hardware sprites and char-based soft sprite objects or bitmap graphics).

 

Sierra seemed to take more of an interest in a different range of computers for whatever reason. (Apple, PC, Amiga, ST, though there was the remake for the Master System too)

 

 

 

As to whether which CPU is more powerful, that's up to context in some regards (ie what you're trying to do), but I don't think we need to start up another one of those discussions. (on the 6502 alone, compared to the Apple II, the A8 has an advantage for sure, though not a 78% one as clock speed shows, but closer to 20% due to DMA time eaten by the video chips -not sure how the C64 compares with DMA taken into account or if it interleaves like the Apple)

[atariksi]

also - disk access, and drive capacity

360k floppy is still twice as big as atari ones, and most games were distributed as SD or ED for compatibility

 

so, who does the porting?

 

I don't know who does the porting but as far as drive capacity goes:

 

I was thinking more like using a banked ROM cart so there would be no disk drive access; that would speed up load times significantly over the CGA version which does pause as you go from one screen to the next. Imagery is compressed so the RAM requirements was I was worried about since you would need a place to decompress and room for a frame buffer for ANTIC (double buffered) as well along with all other RAM requirements for audio/text/etc. But 130XE or Rambo XLs should work fine. Or you make a custom cartridge that does RAM and ROM to support the Atari 400/800.

[OldAtarian]

also - disk access, and drive capacity

360k floppy is still twice as big as atari ones, and most games were distributed as SD or ED for compatibility

 

so, who does the porting?

 

I don't know who does the porting but as far as drive capacity goes:

 

I was thinking more like using a banked ROM cart so there would be no disk drive access; that would speed up load times significantly over the CGA version which does pause as you go from one screen to the next. Imagery is compressed so the RAM requirements was I was worried about since you would need a place to decompress and room for a frame buffer for ANTIC (double buffered) as well along with all other RAM requirements for audio/text/etc. But 130XE or Rambo XLs should work fine. Or you make a custom cartridge that does RAM and ROM to support the Atari 400/800.

 

King's Quest came on a 360k floppy. When was the last time you saw a 360k cart for an A8? Even the OSS supercarts weren't that big. I don't think even Neo Geo carts ever had that much memory.

 

And if you're going to release as a cart, then you can't release only for people with ridiculous amounts of RAM installed or you won't sell any.

Edited December 3, 2010 by OldAtarian

[atariksi]

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

 

It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

 

CGA is still far in excess of what the A8 is capable of video wise and a 4.77mhz 8088/8086 is still faster than a 1.77mhz 6502 and ANTIC can't compare to a good video card in the PC.

For some things CGA is more useful (and includes 640x200 monochrome and 80 column text -both supporting chroma disabled composite video for RGB like clarity on composite monitors and decent quality even in RF), but for games it's really limited compared to the hardware features of the A8 or C64 for that matter.

Best case would be with composite artifacting allowing a pseudo 160x200 16-color NTSC artifact mode (also going beyond the CGA palette limits and a lot of different pseudo palettes possible from the 2 320x200 modes -with 2 palette modes each- and 640x200 -all with 1 indexed color possible and thus 16 different pseudo palettes for each mode or 80 different 16 color pseudo palettes with some much more useful than others).

King's Quest was one of the games to take advantage of this though the RGB mode version looks pretty weak by comparison.

Overall CGA is inferior to A8 ANTIC/GTIA. And you do need a monitor to take advantage of its good things like higher resolution and 16-color 80-column text. But no sprites, weaker palette, no DLIs, vertical-retrace based screen updated (else you get snow), no hardware scrolling, no customized fonts, fixed memory, etc. And the games that were made on CGA systems and A8 show these apparent faults of the CGA. Pac-man flickers although its updating only a few objects. King's Quest doesn't use that much moving graphics so it came out pretty good on CGA. The one I played was on RGB monitor and using the 320*200*4 (3 color + background) with spatial dithering. So resolution-wise Atari can match it using Choplifter sort of coloring scheme in addition to DLIs + P/M enhanced backgrounds and some P/M for story characters. Or you could lower the resolution w/overscan to 176*240. Given video memory can be swapped with a pointer change, you could go for some interlace scheme using 320*200 and 160*200 since most imagery is static.

 

As to whether which CPU is more powerful, that's up to context in some regards (ie what you're trying to do), but I don't think we need to start up another one of those discussions. (on the 6502 alone, compared to the Apple II, the A8 has an advantage for sure, though not a 78% one as clock speed shows, but closer to 20% due to DMA time eaten by the video chips...

 

Both Apple and PC have to rely more on CPU to do their audio and video so divide their clock speed by 27. The memory cycles are inefficient on 8088 systems like Z80. We already had a thread how 6502 wipes out the Z80. The 8088 has better and more register-based instructions than Z80 so if you can optimize algorithms with registers you can easily outdo the 6502. However, for this task where copying buffers to video memory (software sprites) were involved, 6502 would win w/o involving hardware sprites.

 

Don't argue the "27". I picked that out of a hat.

[Rybags]

For such a game, the way to go would be 1 Meg Flashcart and APE.

 

Anyone serious has an APE or equivalent, so disk size becomes virtually irrelevant.

[spookt]

 

King's Quest came on a 360k floppy. When was the last time you saw a 360k cart for an A8? Even the OSS supercarts weren't that big. I don't think even Neo Geo carts ever had that much memory.

 

And if you're going to release as a cart, then you can't release only for people with ridiculous amounts of RAM installed or you won't sell any.

 

Hmm the Corina cart can have up to 1Mb if you don't need SRAM or 512Kb with SRAM. Bomb Jake runs fine on my 64Kb machine from the GR8 Software Corina cart.

[+poobah]

[Overall CGA is inferior to A8 ANTIC/GTIA. And you do need a monitor to take advantage of its good things like higher resolution and 16-color 80-column text. But no sprites, weaker palette, no DLIs, vertical-retrace based screen updated (else you get snow), no hardware scrolling, no customized fonts, fixed memory, etc. And the games that were made on CGA systems and A8 show these apparent faults of the CGA. Pac-man flickers although its updating only a few objects. King's Quest doesn't use that much moving graphics so it came out pretty good on CGA. The one I played was on RGB monitor and using the 320*200*4 (3 color + background) with spatial dithering. So resolution-wise Atari can match it using Choplifter sort of coloring scheme in addition to DLIs + P/M enhanced backgrounds and some P/M for story characters. Or you could lower the resolution w/overscan to 176*240. Given video memory can be swapped with a pointer change, you could go for some interlace scheme using 320*200 and 160*200 since most imagery is static.

CGA flicker was only a problem on the original IBM CGA adapter card. It used single port memory for the frame buffer. Almost every other CGA implementation used dual port memory, so "snow" or flicker was not a problem on these cards.

 

I agree CGA was pretty sad, but lets TRY to be accurate here.

[Tempest]

Minimum requirements on the Apple were 128K and the ability to do double hi-res graphics (II+ onwards?) IIRC. I know it needed 128K because my friend only had 64K and he couldn't play it. It came on two double sided disks.

 

Tempest

[kool kitty89]

also - disk access, and drive capacity

360k floppy is still twice as big as atari ones, and most games were distributed as SD or ED for compatibility

 

so, who does the porting?

 

I don't know who does the porting but as far as drive capacity goes:

 

I was thinking more like using a banked ROM cart so there would be no disk drive access; that would speed up load times significantly over the CGA version which does pause as you go from one screen to the next. Imagery is compressed so the RAM requirements was I was worried about since you would need a place to decompress and room for a frame buffer for ANTIC (double buffered) as well along with all other RAM requirements for audio/text/etc. But 130XE or Rambo XLs should work fine. Or you make a custom cartridge that does RAM and ROM to support the Atari 400/800.

In modern terms, yes, but back then (1984/85) you wouldn't be getting a ROM that large practically. (ie without being unreasonably expensive) Using 2 double sided disks would be FAR more practical, let alone using some compression on disk data. (plus you'd probably be using 2 bpp character graphics rather than 4bpp character/blitter object graphics drawn to the framebuffer in CGA -which, again, would also facilitate working in less RAM -the apple II version would be 4bpp as well given it seems to use the double high-res 560x192 mode of later models and composite artifacting to 140x192 with ~16 colors -vs the 4 color artifacts of most 280x192 stuff -technically more possible colors, but not on a pixel per pixel bitmap basis)

 

360 kB ROMs (assuming Sierra even used the full 360 kB) would have been practical by the late 80s, but that's a different context from a contemporary release of the Apple/PC/PCJr/Tandy 1000/Amiga/ST releases. (the original EGA version wasn't until 1987, but that was simply because EGA wasn't considered a viable game platform for the most part before then -and it was a bare bones port of the Tandy/PCJr version)

 

 

King's Quest came on a 360k floppy. When was the last time you saw a 360k cart for an A8? Even the OSS supercarts weren't that big. I don't think even Neo Geo carts ever had that much memory.

ROFL, consoles were commonly using 512 kB in the late 80s for higher-end games and 256 kB for mid-range stuff. (back in '85/86 it was 128k for the mid-high end stuff though)

 

ROM prices were ever falling and you had some 640 kB games in 1989 (Ghouls n' Ghosts on the Genesis) and a good chunk of 1 MB games appearing in 1990/91, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 MB games on the SNES and Genesis respectively. Lower end N64 games tended to not drop below 8 MB and they later peaked at 64 MB. Cost is the only limiting factor. Though consoles often used bits rather than bytes for memory, so multiply all that by 8 for the kb/Mbit figures. (ie 128k is 1 Mbit, 4 MB is 32 Mbit, 64 MB is 512 Mbit, etc) There are several 512 MB games on the DS too. (and it probably will go a good bit higher than that -probably would have already if it was a higher end system -like if the PSP had gone with ROM/flash memory rather than optical they'd probably have around 4x the average ROM size to DS games if not more)

 

Going to arcade games, you have FAR more than that much earlier on, let alone an early 90s system like the Neo Geo. (which was more of a low-mid range arcade board for the time) Neo Geo games tended to be several megabytes on the lower end of things early on with many games commonly exceeding 8 MB and far more as time went on, to the point of even resorting to bank switching beyond the possible flat address space into the area of 64-90 MB for some late games. (that's 512-720 Mbit) And like a number of arcade boards, the cost didn't stop at high ROM capacity, but also fast ROM (so much so that some of the Neo Geo CD games saw slowdown from the RAM being slower ), and multiple buses on the cart for the 68k, Z80+audio, and video (the NES did that to a limited extent with dual CPU+video buses on cart wt the expense of using 2 ROM chips for all carts minimum and 1.5-2x the pin count of competing platforms).

[andym00]

Or you make a custom cartridge that does RAM and ROM to support the Atari 400/800.

 

Are there any A8 games using such a cartridge setup ? I know the Corina Cart offers this (and more), but is there anything that ever shipped commerically in cart form using such a RAM/ROM setup ?

Or even any PCBs for such a cart ?

 

 

 

[+remowilliams]

How would that make it 'doable' on a 1.78 MHz Atari?

 

All they had to to back then is cut the resolution down, turn everything to shades of gray, cut all the characters legs off to save on animation, chop down the story and limit you to one room that you can't leave.

 

Simple!