Maybe Ken can indeed answer. I’ll ask the questions for Jim here (I’m sure he won’t mind 😉 ), but I’d also like to know.
– Why a resolution of 160×200 was chosen for the AGI engine, as it was created for the PCjr, and the PCjr was capable of displaying 320×200 with the same amount of colors (16). Was any porting to the Apple 2 (or maybe other machines like the C64) already planned at the time?
– At least in the Tandy 1000 version (not sure about the PCjr), the original King’s Quest and the following AGI games use the 320×200 resolution to display the 160×200 graphics, although the PCjr and Tandy 1000 machines feature a native 160x200x16 graphics mode. Why was this move taken, as it consumes more memory and makes the games slightly slower since twice as many pixels must be written? Was it to display the more-easily-readable 320×200 font?
– Was it considered at any point when developing the AGI engine for the PCjr, if Apple 2 conversion was planned, to have the resolution adaptable? Since the graphics are made of lines and region fills, it could have been possible to have the coordinates stored for 320×200, then the x coordinates divided by 2 for the Apple 2 and other 8-bit machines. Were there other issues involved that prevented from doing this in a reasonable (or even doable considering the deadline) time?
Thanks in advance for any recollection,
Vincent.