Re: Rare IIgs Games

[labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth)]

In article <Pine.GSO.3.95q.990614095509.29196B-100000@nova.kettering.edu>,
John Lingl <ling1984@kettering.edu> wrote:

> Space Quest III was never released for the Apple IIGS because it was
> written using a different interpreter called SCI (Sierra Creative
> Interpretter). SCI would also be used for Police Quest II, Leisure Suit
> Larry II and so on. The older games (Space Quest I, King's Quest II) used
> AGI (Adventure GAme Interpretter). SCI had much better grphics (320x200)
> but ran incredibly slow. I remmber talking to a Sierra customer rep and
> they said the only way their games would be playable is if everyone had a
> TWGS and they figured not enough did.  So it could be possible that much
> of the game is coded but never released.  (I had ordered both these games
> only to be dissapointed when it was cancelled.) 

Well, here's an interesting thing...it's proably not really the resolution
or sound or any of the multimedia aspects that bogged down an SCI0 release
for the IIgs.
AGI, Sierra's first 'universal' game system, used bytecode compiled
scripts that were run universally under software which interpreted it for
each specific platform, with some special additions on some
platforms...Like a button and window based GUI for the mac, delightfully
enhanced sound for the IIgs..

SCI, however, had it's own sort of virtual CPU which ran within the
environment and ran SCI code...SCI even had it's own built-in debugger,
allowing you to set breakpoints, step through code, view the
assembly-level code in a small window...anyway, perhaps it was a
combination of very slow execution (makes me think of some of the first
emulator releases that came out) and a small market base, because, AFAIK,
SCI0 only came out for the x86 and 68k platforms, that caused the IIgs
release to founder. And even the Mac SCI0 ports were pretty horrible and
buggy and slow.

Well, the main reason I point this info out is because almost every time
the IIgs-SCI0-Sierra intrigue pops up, people invariably say 'Those fools!
all the Sierra games ran at 320x200 on the IIgs! It could have done it
with no problem! And I had a TWGS, along with all these other people I
know, so man...what was up with them?'

BTW, SCI0 was the first version of SCI...it contained the text-based
parser like the AGI games...later versions of SCI had the stupid
icon-based interfaces, which was SCI1 and SCI32. I think there were about
a half-dozen SCI0 games in all.