Adventure game interpreter

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AGI - short for A dventure G ame I nterpreter  - is a programming tool and a game engine , which by Sierra Online , was used to the early Adventures program.

The first King's Quest title originally used a Game Assemble Language or so *.gal-called program language . Its designer was Arthur Abraham. When he left Sierra, the company was no longer able to finish the game. King's Quest was supposed to serve as a flagship product for the technology of the IBM PCjr . So IBM "donated" its product, AGI, to Sierra in order to keep the development of King's Quest going.

In the mid-1980s , AGI was an innovative technology. Newer versions have been adapted to 16-color EGA GRAPHICS and AdLib - sound card support. Less known is the fact that the Apple IIgs version of AGI already had support for digital sound and polyphonic music.

In the late 1980s but began AGI 160 × 200 resolution on to show their age and could not with newer engines like SCUMM of Lucasfilm compete Games, which were characterized by mouse control. In 1990, Sierra replaced AGI for adventure games with the newly developed SCI engine .

The AGI system was ported to platforms other than the PCjr in the 1980s, and some games were released commercially on the Apple II , Macintosh , Amiga, and Atari ST . Although there was a Sega Master System version of King's Quest and an NES version of King's Quest V, it is very unlikely that they would use the AGI software system.

List of AGI games

This is a list of Sierra games developed in AGI. It should be noted here that there have been fan companies and other individuals who have usually produced shareware or unofficial AGI games.

King's Quest IV was produced and published simultaneously in AGI and SCI versions. The main advantages of SCI are a higher resolution (320 × 200 instead of 160 × 200 in AGI), sound card support, mouse support and a more versatile script system. Sierra assumed that some systems would not be able to run the SCI version and developed a "light" version of the game. However, this turned out to be wrong and the AGI version was quickly discontinued. That is why the AGI version is considered a collector's item.

Alternative AGI game engines

  • Sarien ( S ierra A GI R esource I nterpreter En gine) is an open source storage engine, the AGI games can run. Sarien works on Linux / Unix, Windows, Sega Dreamcast and GP32.
  • NAGI ( N ew A dventure G ame I nterpreter) is an open source AGI game engine for Linux and Windows, which is almost complete and has additional features such as mouse support.
  • AGI Studio An open source program that enables the in-house development of AGI-based games. Editing of the old Sierra games is also possible.
  • MEKA was the first public alternative AGI game engine. The name is an acronym that combines the names of the authors (Joakim Möller, Lanze Ewing and Peter Kelly) and the word adventure. It is open source and is only available for DOS.

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