How to get Sierra's AGI Games
to run in Windows XP

The Sierra AGI games (King's Quest I, II, III, and the rare AGI version of IV) should run fine on most Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines. You get the one MIDI voice beeping through the case speaker (you can press F2 as soon as you start the game to kill the PC Speaker music if you don't want to hear it) 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 that can be found at Quest Studios' Sierra Utilities Page, agimid05.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 do not implement the old VESA standard very well, if at all, and the text in the game might be garbled and unreadable. This problem will occur on Windows 95/98/ME as well. To get around this you can run the games with one of the new third party AGI interpreters such as NAGI or Sarien.

Sarien looks promising, but is still in the early stages of development. "Sarien has features not present in the original Sierra On-Line interpreter. These extra functionalities include double horizontal resolution, enhanced color palette, dictionary and picture viewers, three-channel PCM sound, support to AGDS (a Russian AGI clone) games and a "Quake console" with integrated debugger." It is not obvious how to use Sarien and there is no documentation for it.

NAGI is much more fully developed, easier to set up and comes with full documentation. With NAGI you'll hear all three MIDI voices and you get limited mouse support within the games. Its one draw back is that it will not run full screen ( see note below for a work around).

To run Sierra's AGI games with NAGI:

• Download NAGI (151 kb) and unzip it to the folder of your choice
  
  
• Download SDL which is a free generic library, and unzip it to your NAGI folder (NAGI requires this .dll to run)
  
  
• Now just drop each of your AGI game folders inside your NAGI folder
  
  
• Open your NAGI folder and launch "n.exe". 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: NAGI by default does not run full screen, but you can either edit the line,

full_screen=0  

to

 full_screen=1

in the NAGI.INI. Or you can set "n.exe" to run in Compatibility mode and select run in 640 x 480 screen resolution to make it fill most of the screen.

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