Sounds from the original King's Quest

[paralipsis]

Not sure if you would count it as anything more than a sound effect, but what I am after is the original PC speaker tune that plays as you walk around in the original version of King's Quest.

Considering it contains only a six note loop, it shows how unmusical I am that I cannot reconstruct it myself. Any help would be breatly appreciated.

[Great Hierophant]

You must be talking about the early, booter versions of King's Quest.  Not a lot of music in that game.

[paralipsis]

Yeah, that's right. I can't find that version anywhere around. (It has long since vanished from my collection of acquired stuff). It was the first game I ever played on a PC, and that little collection of beeps holds an irrational sway upon my memory. Would be nice to hear it again outside of my own head.

[Tom]

I'm not sure how to record those speaker sounds, or if I can still make the bootable version work.  That, too, was the first PC game I ever played (along with Simon & Schuster's "The Kobayashi Alternative" text adventure) and it holds a lot of fond memories.  My 5.26" drive isn't currently setup to work as a boot drive, but maybe I'll play around with it and see if I can get into that old game.

[Dustin]

I used to have an IBM PCjr not long ago and still have the King's Quest booter disk. The monitor had a speaker used my the jr's 3-voice fm card to make the music, and for what it was, it wasn't all that bad. Sounded much better then the pc speaker. Wish I still had that PCjr, the cool thing about it was that it had RCA outputs for audio and video. I could have recorded the music from that thing really quickly. I too would like to hear the original KQ1 theme.

[Alistair]

I assume you mean a theme in the lands, not the Greensleeves opening tune, right? (Which reminds me, Tom once said he preferred Greensleeves to the KQ1 SCI track. Shame! ;P)

I guess you could use AGIMIDI and record it digitally, or use AGISBand do the same. I mean, I can record it as a MIDI, but I've a lot on my plate right now.

- Alistair

[Marten]

It isn't possible to use AGIMIDI or AGISB with the "booter" version of King's Quest.  That is only possible with the reworked MS-DOS versions, which actually hit the market around the same time King's Quest III did.

The very original version of KQ used different sound effects and music than the later MS-DOS AGI version.  So, one might say that King's Quest has now been made 4 times...
  * Original "booter" version
  * MS-DOS AGI version
  * EGA SCI version
  * VGA version (AGDInteractive)

Related trivia:

The earliest version of AGI worked a bit differently from the MS-DOS version.  All screens were rendered in real time, so when you entered an area, you'd see the screen blank and then the game would draw in the borders and literally "paint" in the colors.  When Sierra rewrote the AGI engine to run under MS-DOS, they made changes that allowed almost instantaneous screen updates when your character walked into a new area, so you wouldn't have to wait on the scene to be painted in.

[Tom]

There isn't a 'Greensleeves' opening theme in the original boot version of KQ.  Just a small bit of PC speaker rendered fanfare.  (I later used the fanfare in a MIDI rendition of KQ music that I called, "Quests Of The King"...along with some of the sound f/x.)  

Marten's right ... you can't use a MIDI utilitiy to record it or play the music from the original KQ disk.  Maybe recording it with a microphone is the only easy option.  I'll try getting the game to run, today.

Which reminds me, Tom once said he preferred Greensleeves to the KQ1 SCI track. Shame!

If I did say that, why would it be a "shame"?

[paralipsis]

Would be grateful for whatever you can manage. Thanks!

[Alistair]

Ah, right! Shows how much I know about AGI games. I'd be interested to hear it, and I always liked the themes in Quests of the King.. (Love that one.)

If I did say that, why would it be a "shame"?

Yes, you said it, sometime. (Who knows when.) No, more like a sarcastic 'Shame! Shame', like in Monty Python, or something. I always vastly prefered Ken Allen's *excellent* composition over the original Greensleeves track. Much more appropriate (Sierra borrowed enough music! Found out recently LSL3 has a ton of ripoffs). Though I guess KQ1AGI and SCI feel different, even though they're essentially the same.

(KQ1 theme is one of my earliest Sierra memories.)

- Alistair

[Tom]

The very first KQ game didn't have an actual theme, and this is what paralipsis is after...along with those little 'speaker tinkles' heard while exploring.

=========

My Compaq PC won't boot from Drive B, where my 5.25" is located.    I've set it to boot from Drive A and am using the "SUBST" command to reroute on a boot disk.  I've formatting a System Disk from Win98SE, with the SUBST.EXE command accessed through an AUTOEXEC.BAT.  (If anyone has a MS-DOS v6.22 version of the SUBST.EXE file, I'd prefer to use real DOS for this.)

So far, no luck.  My 5.25" drive keeps giving me General Failure Read errors.  The drive is working, and I've used it on this PC before, but it could be dusty.  I'll try cleaning it, again, and see if I can get it to work...

---- Later ----

There's nothing wrong with the diskette drive, it's the damn Compaq CMOS.  It's keeps changing the CMOS setting from 5.25 HD drive, and telling the PC that it has a second 3.5" drive instead.  I think I'm going to try installing the drive in my Sysmax PC...

[Tom]

Later, that same day...

I've installed my 5.25" drive in another PC and it's working fine.  I can boot into KQ and KQ2 (v1.1H/September 1985, which was originally a bootable game.)  I had forgotten that the first release of KQ2 was also a self-boot game -- I'm glad I still have it.  However, I'm having some issues with the first KQ...

KQ won't produce an image or any sound.  The PC speaker is working, and KQ2 played Greensleeves...but I'm not hearing any of those neat little speaker twinkles as I wonder about in KQ2.  The "CTRL-R" option (to set RGB mode) isn't helping, either.

I only have one copy of KQ-bootable, and I'm guessing it doesn't like my graphic card.  I'll continue to play around and see what I can do.

KQ2 (bootable version) works in DEMO mode if you do nothing after boot up.  It plays the credits and first two scenes, over and over.  Forgot about that.

[NewRisingSUn]

Couple of points.

There are 3 versions of the self-booting KQ1:
- one for PCjr (doesn't work on Tandy OR PC)
- one for Tandy (works on PCjr and Tandy)
- one for PC (works on everything)

Obviously, the first two don't work on modern computers. The third version works on today's systems as far as the main program is concerned, however, the on-disk copy protection doesn't work --- not because the machine is too fast or anything, but because the BIOS of AT and better computers automatically recalibrate after reading a bad sector, while PC and XT BIOSes don't, and that's what breaks the copy protection check.

Now, as far as the music is concerned:
You might know that the Tandy's 3-voice sound chip is the same as found in the Sega Master System (SMS). Some people who really like early computer music have created a music file format called VGM which basically records what is being sent to the chip. A Winamp plugin to play these files is available:

http://www.smspower.org/music/vgmtools.shtml

Again, since the Tandy uses the same chip, this format is very convenient to use for AGI music. I have converted the music for some games into this format, including the original KQ1's opening theme. Download the archive (146 kilobytes):

(link removed)

I have only included music, not sound effects. Corrections to existing track names as well as names for currently unnamed files are welcome.

As far as the original games are concerned, you should be able to play the original disk images by using the "BOOT imagename" command in Dosbox with the original disk image file. Otherwise, I also still have some of my old DOS wrappers (like WHDLoad from the Amiga) from pre-emulation days.

When Sierra rewrote the AGI engine to run under MS-DOS, they made changes that allowed almost instantaneous screen updates when your character walked into a new area, so you wouldn't have to wait on the scene to be painted in.

Well, it's not "instantaneous" because it's faster, it's just that AGI v2+ no longer draws directly to the screen, but into a shadow buffer, which is then copied to the screen. So while the total wait period is the same, you just don't see the drawing process any more. This "shadow buffer" of course increased AGI's memory requirements from the original 128k to 256k. That, and the fact that DOS steals away memory that a self-booting game could use for itself.

[Tom]

Well, I have the IBM PC (not Tandy or PC Jr.) versions of these games.  I think I remember seeing a Tandy-compatible version at Radio Shack when I bought my first Tandy 1000A PC, but I didn't buy any Sierra titles from Radio Shack.  The KQ and KQ2 disks I have where copied (using COPIIPC) from my old boss, from the IBM PC versions.  They've worked well throughout the years, but I'm running them now on a Pentium II.  As I said, KQ2 v1.1H boots up and runs fine on this PC.  And KQ boots okay, and the disk is being accessed, but the graphics won't display.  There is no copy protection on these disks -- it was completely removed using COPYIIPC, as I did with all my early Sierra games...so I could make backups.

So, obviously, the original PC version of KQ doesn't always work well on today's modern computers.  My 486DX (with VESA graphics) is in pieces right now, so I can't try the game on that.  The later versions of KQ and KQ "I" didn't have the same sounds as the original boot version, so I'm not interested in those.  They do, however, run just fine on today's PC's....and they begin with "Greensleeves", just as KQ2 did.

[NewRisingSUn]

As I said, KQ2 v1.1H boots up and runs fine on this PC.  

Well, KQ2 uses a different copy protection scheme as KQ1, but the graphics code is more or less the same, so if KQ2 works but KQ doesn't, I'd say it's the copy protection that might be the problem, not the graphics card. On my Pentium 2, KQ2 1.0W as well as 1.1H work perfectly (with CGA graphics, of course), while the original KQ does not, while a "cracked" KQ does.

And KQ boots okay, and the disk is being accessed,

That's not conclusive proof against the hypothesis that it's the copy protection which is the problem.

but the graphics won't display.

Just WHAT exactly is being displayed? Do you get a black screen, or do you still see whatever your BIOS displayed before trying to access the disk?

There is no copy protection on these disks -- it was completely removed using COPYIIPC,

COPYIIPC doesn't "remove" the copy protection, it just copies the copy-protected tracks properly so that the game can't tell the original from the copy. I still think it's the copy protection code which I know fails on modern computers, it's the same routine found on other Sierra titles of that time.

[Tom]

I guess I just assumed that when NoGuard asks, "Do you wish to completely remove the copy protection from this disk?", then, it actually did 'completely remove the copy protection from the disk'.


As I mentioned, none of the KQ bootable disks I have contain copy protection, and I've used them any number of times throughout the years on various PC's...everything from an old Tandy 1000 PC, to a Pentium 90.  Whether or not they originally contained different copy protection schemes (which was common back in the mid-1980's), it doesn't matter.  These disks aren't protected and have been used on other, older systems.

What happens when I insert the KQ diskette and turn the power on, is:  A message stating "Copyright 1984 Sierra On-Line, Inc."  flashes pretty quickly...and that's all I see.  The disk whirs a bit.  Stops.  The scene must change because it'll whir a bit more.  Stop.  etc.

All of my early Sierra diskette-based games have gone through the COPYIIPC/Noguard process -- I made backups of everything.  I just tried a couple of other 'backed-up Noguard' games:  PQ and Black Cauldron.  They work fine.  Though, BC WAS purchased for my Tandy, from Radio Shack.  It used to be copy protected as well.

[NewRisingSUn]

I guess I just assumed that when NoGuard asks, "Do you wish to completely remove the copy protection from this disk?", then, it actually did 'completely remove the copy protection from the disk'.

Ah, now "NoGuard" is something different, earlier you only wrote you just copied them with CopyIIPC, so I assumed you just copied them. You could have said that earlier

What happens when I insert the KQ diskette and turn the power on, is:  A message stating "Copyright 1984 Sierra On-Line, Inc."  flashes pretty quickly...and that's all I see.  The disk whirs a bit.  Stops.  The scene must change because it'll whir a bit more.  Stop.  etc.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I still don't think that it's your graphics card though, given that all those other AGI games work which use the exact same graphics engine. Maybe the disk itself has gone bad, not unconscionable after twenty years; self-booting games are not particularly known to be verbose about error messages.
Let's check your disk if it has bad sectors --- usually you would use WinImage to do that, but WinImage doesn't seem to handle booter disks very well. Try using this command line-based utility, run "readdisk test.ima" from your hard disk with the KQ disk in drive A:
(url removed)
This should produce a disk image of the KQ1 disk, as well as a text file READ.ERR detailing where on the disk any read errors occured.

Should it turn out that your disk is bad, I will be happy to send you my intact disk image (which should otherwise be identical to yours), along with a program writdisk.com so you can write it back to another disk (even a 3.5" one).

[Great Hierophant]

If an object was hidden behind, inside or underneath another object, you would be able to see it during the drawing of the AGI v.1 games, but not for the later AGI v.2/3 games.  In both King's Quest and King's Quest II you can use this feature to identify items that would be hidden by otherwise non-descript scenery.

[Zemus]

Has any of you tried out Flopper? It creates image files of bootable games and runs them from DOS. Beats having to boot the whole computer to play a game.
As the site says, the image-creator could use better copy-protection handling so maybe it won't work for all games.

[Tom]

Aren't COPYIIPC and NoGuard the same thing?  It's been so long since I've used it....17 years.  But I thought NoGuard was the utility that poped up on the screen after you loaded COPYIIPC.

Maybe the disk itself has gone bad, not unconscionable after twenty years; self-booting games are not particularly known to be verbose about error messages.

That's what I suspected -- bad sectors on the diskette.  Readdisk reports "ERR 04 Sector not found" for track 39, sectors 01-09.  I'd be grateful to get a copy of this original KQ disk image.