King's Quest: Quest for the Crown

Thanks. You are right - I tested in 6.0.5 through 6.0.8 and the game play is more stable, in that the graphical corruption and artifacts that can sometimes randomly show up around the edges of the main gaming window (i.e. around the interface and menu areas) in System 7.x do not appear to show up at all in 6.0.x. That corruption issue is common to most of the color Sierra games of this era. I remember it happening with Space Quest I and others.

On the other hand, I noticed that in 6.0.x the text that appears in the white box at the bottom of the screen during the credits, and in the "About King's Quest" menu window does not show up. I suppose that is a minor drawback considering the game play is fine. I never realized the graphical corruption was related to something in System 7.x (a QuickDraw update?). Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I will upload another disk image (in the MAME compatible HDA format) of the game pre-installed in System 6.0.8.

Well done! Thanks!
BTW: it works much more stable under Mini vMacII 6.0.8 OS

Happy to be of service. I got impatient waiting around for an official color version to show up .. it is possible we may never see that happen. Hopefully, this can offer something as close as possible to the original experience. I have provided direct downloads and additional comments above.

Good job! Would you mind uploading it to the Mac Garden as well? Maybe as a kq1_agi_hacked.sit, so that it is preserved and can be downloaded from our retro machines right away?

I have extended on the work-around mentioned by blindowl below. I took the executable for King's Quest III, which uses an AGI version that will run King's Quest I in color, with the correct palette and fonts for a King's Quest game. In addition, I used ResEdit to patch in certain King's Quest I particulars, such as the "About" graphic and menu commands to match the original game. For all intents and purposes, this could pass for the original AGI color release, as far as I can tell.

The only proviso is that the original scrolling credits in the black and white version are hard-coded into the game resources, and cannot be converted to a format that will display correctly on top of the colorized graphics. Therefore, the only glitch with this approach is that you will see the black and white credits scroll on top of the colorized background, overlapping onto the title banner. Apart from that, I think this is as close as we can get to the original experience, unless someone who knows how to code AGI can further tweak it, or if the original AGI color release ever shows up online.

Via the DropBox link below, I have provided a SIT archive (in a zip file) containing the game, ready to use in SheepShaver/Basilisk II or real hardware.

I also included a dsk image that can be directly loaded using Mini vMac, with the game set to automatically start on boot up. You will need to configure Mini vMac to emulate a Mac II with 16 color graphics in 640x480 resolution. The image contains System 7.1.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/30az42aw2dzmgwd/AAAO4rhibkdPVuA7XIbyvIo_a?dl=0

Too bad that there were no real fixes for all agi-games to work either in B&W or in Color on System 6 and 7"

For anyone dying to play this game in color on real HW. You can use Larry 1 (2.06) to run the game. Drop all the game files from the KQ1 folder into the Larry folder and start the game. It will complain about game ID mismatch, but will start anyway. The fonts also doesn't match so the intro looks a bit glitchy, but gameplay seem to work! It'll use Larry's color palette, not sure if that's 100% accurate. I also don't know if the whole game is playable without issues..

(Only tried on a IIci — 6.0.7 and 7.1.)

There appears to be a fix to the AGI 16 colour issue. Larry 1 with AGI 2.06 works in 16 colours, on Basilisk II with some issues, works without errors on my LC 475 in 24bit mode. So keep an eye out for 2.x releases, only the interpreter seems to have changed (1991 date stamp), the other files and game version appear to be unchanged. More details of my testing and experiments at https://www.savagetaylor.com/2019/12/15/68k-macintosh-and-sierra-agi-games/

The color versions appear to have been released 1989, I went through some old sierra newsletters and macworld editions to put together a timeline of AGI releases. http://www.savagetaylor.com/2019/12/15/68k-macintosh-and-sierra-agi-games/

I also think I found out the reason for the issue with the color versions, it appears to be a incompatibility caused by the move from 24-bit to 32-bit quickdraw.

I believe the Sierra Mac AGI games had a late 80s re-release, which is why some have Mac II friendly fixes and some don't.

Chances are there's a later version of this KQ that works on a Mac II or later out there. Just need to find the floppies!

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