Reply To: Building a SIERRA computer

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Quote:
“… (by King Rygar) Thanks Daniel! Is there anywhere I can get boot disks for the games? Which DOS should I get? Windows 3.1?

Thanks again!
…”

OS: If you can’t find a copy of DOS 6.22 (I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find the images on the ‘Net somewhere), there’s always freedos. I’d recommend a DOS/Win3.1 combo over Win95. I don’t recall any Sierra games requiring EMS, so you shouldn’t need to load anything fancy like QEMM on boot.

CPU: That DX2 is fine

Memory: Whatever you’ve got should work. If you are going to play Windows 3.1 based games though, have 4 megs or above.

On sound: The sound card should be a Sound Blaster, MediaVision, or Gravis – the big players back then. If you want to play the first SCI games in all their glory, the early ones supported the Roland MT-32, and there are some of those things on eBay. Keep in mind that the Sound Blaster’s MIDI port wasn’t a true MPU-401, so Sierra games won’t recognize an MT32 hooked up to it. However, the patch provided in this post will fix that problem. I am not sure if the MediaVision or Gravis had MPU compliant interfaces, though. But all of those old sound cards also had a daughtercard port (for Roland Sound Canvas, et al), but those generally comply with the GM standard of MIDI, whereas most of Sierra’s old stuff was sequenced exclusively for the MT-32. Eventually GM support showed up in a lot of their games, but I’m sure KQ4 doesn’t have it.

Sierra’s AGI games also had better music than what a PC speaker could provide, but they used a three-voice sound chip found in the Tandy and PCjr. I do not know of any program you can run on your legacy box to emulate that through the Sound Blaster. The only program I found that can do it is Dosbox when it’s in Tandy mode. Very slick, but I noticed that a few people here have complained about Dosbox being hard to set up. If you are somewhat technically inclined, though, I suggest you give it a spin.

MT-32 Sound Blaster MIDI driver for SCI games