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hello mr. williams. im sure this question has been asked many times before, but i was wondering if it was even legal to re-code the old sci and ags interpreters. i would love to remake these engines using directx so that all of us that own the old games would finally be able to enjoy them on xp and so forth. now i know that there are people out there that have backwards engineered sci, and have made some new versions, but they are very bug ridden. does sierra own the rights to these engines, or just the games and characters created with them. i have no idea how copyrights work, so im sure this probably isnt legally possible. was there ever any official printed documentation of the interpreters? that would be wonderfull! but again, im sure not legal to distibute. as a developer, i am totally against giving software away for free, but i dont see the harm in updating engines and distributing just those files. that way people that own the game can just install the original game, and then copy the new engine files over top the old ones. if they used there copies of the original games for the data and resource files, i dont see what the problem would be, but then again i dont know the copyright laws. isnt that kind of what patch files do? again, i hope not to offend, i do not mean that i am for giving the games away for free, just updated engine code. any information would be greatly appreciated. im sorry if this is asked all the time. also, thanks for the many years of fun! thanks for your time.
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(re: re: Ken Williams Q&A) hello mr. williams. im sure this question has been asked many times before, but i was wondering if it was even legal to re-code the old sci and ags interpreters. i would love to remake these engines using directx so that all of us that own the old games would finally be able to enjoy them on xp and so forth. now i know that there are people out there that have backwards engineered sci, and have made some new versions, but they are very bug ridden. does sierra own the rights to these engines, or just the games and characters created with them. i have no idea how copyrights work, so im sure this probably isnt legally possible. was there ever any official printed documentation of the interpreters? that would be wonderfull! but again, im sure not legal to distibute. as a developer, i am totally against giving software away for free, but i dont see the harm in updating engines and distributing just those files. that way people that own the game can just install the original game, and then copy the new engine files over top the old ones. if they used there copies of the original games for the data and resource files, i dont see what the problem would be, but then again i dont know the copyright laws. isnt that kind of what patch files do? again, i hope not to offend, i do not mean that i am for giving the games away for free, just updated engine code. any information would be greatly appreciated. im sorry if this is asked all the time. also, thanks for the many years of fun! thanks for your time.
I don’t know the legal issues on re-building the AGI or SCI interpretor. I would be totally shocked if Sierra were to ever sue someone for doing so. AGI and SCI are just interpretors, that we ourselves “copied” at the time. It’s not like we invented object programming. We just built our own implementation of it. How could Sierra claim ownership of an interpretor? Perhaps a particular implementation, but you aren’t talking about using their implementation.
Anyway, that’s my opinion – but since I’m not a lawyer – it may not mean much of anything…
Personally, I have no documentation whatsoever from AGI or SCI. I don’t even think I have any old source code for either the interpretors or the games. If I ever find any, I’ll think about posting it here – but I’m fairly positive I don’t have any.
There was a VERY interesting post on this website today. One of the original fathers of AGI and SCI, Chris Iden, left a message for me. He is working with a bunch of other ex-Sierra developers on building games – from our old building in Oakhurst. I will be worth watching what he does. His team is VERY strong. You may be able to write him about the details of SCI and AGI. I’m not sure what all he remembers. It was a LONG time ago.
-Ken W -
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(re: re: Ken Williams Q&A) Brian Provinciano is developing SCI Studio,
Link: http://www.bripro.com/scistudio/index.php(http://www.bripro.com/scistudio/index.php)
. The new version, when it is released, will not only be able to create new SCI games, but also open, edit and decomplile ALL versions of SCI games. SCI Studio 4 is supposedly mostly finished, but needs to have extensive documentation written for it yet. The current version, 3.0.1.29 can work with EGA SCI games. -
(re: re: re: Ken Williams Q&A) There are new interpreters for Sierra’s games, such as Sarien and NAGI for the old AGI games and FreeSCI for the SCI games. Unfortunately, FreeSCI is not nearly as developed as ScummVM. It has some sound issues and only has SCI0 (EGA) support. Rudimentary support for SCI1 (VGA) game is being developed in Glutton, an experimental branch of FreeSCI.
DOSBox is a solution for many Sierra DOS games. -
(re: re: re: Ken Williams Q&A) I’ve been a long time campainer for SCUMMVM. It’s a cool piece of software 🙂
When they started out, they started from scratch and wrote the SCUMM interpreter from trial and error. Consequently, it has taken years to get where they are with supporting Lucasarts games.
Now, just about EVERYONE who uses it (SCUMMVM) would love Sierra adventures to run inside the environment. IMO, this isn’t going to happen without one thing – source code. The SCUMMVM team have had huge support of late from a couple of companies – Revolution gave them source (and support) for Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword 1 & 2 and John Passfield recently gave them the source code to Flight of the Amazon Queen. This latest title is being worked on at the moment and will probably be available for the next major release. I’ve been in conversation with the project leader over future games (a subject they are *very* dismissive over) and it’s clear that the SCUMMVM team has neither the time or energy to start from scratch supporting any other games. It’d be a huge task as there were a considerable number of Sierra games released! However, if they did have the source code and had people on the development team willing to live and breath a game for several months then ‘it’ would eventually happen.
There are a couple of other interpreters available: The most prominent AGI intepreter out there is NAGI – it supports pretty much all you’d want to support! However, SCI is the main issue – FreeSCI is good but doesn’t support SCI1 which drives at least one game with most issues under a modern OS (Gabriel Knight 1).
Here’s to the future, should there be one 😉 -
(re: AGI Interpreter Recoding)
Note that there is now an XBOX port of Sarien – called SarienX – I have not yet tried it, but I’m going to … I’m not sure how it interacts with keyboards; there’s two methods of it on XBOX, one is running a keyboard server on a PC and the other a custom XBOX keyboard driver using a USB keyboard (much better).. I probably won’t bother until SarienX supports the keyboard driver…
Of course, all of this requires a modified XBOX. But if all you’re using it for is homebrew software, its okay.
🙂
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(re: AGI Interpreter Recoding) And don’t forget Brian Provinciano’s latest release, GBAGI.
Basically, it’s AGI on a GameBoy Advance. You need a flash cart for full advantage, though… you can’t get it onto a cartridge without one, and if you’re going to use an emulator, you might as well use another interpreter. -
(re: re: AGI Interpreter Recoding)
I actually have thought about writing a Java based AGI (or maybe SCI) interpreter, but between school and my other projects, I doubt I would have the time to do anything about it other than get people’s hopes up. Plus, there’s also the nearly self defeating concept of running a virtual machine inside a virtual machine. XD
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(re: AGI Interpreter Recoding)
You’re all forgetting [or just not knowing about] Peter Whatever-his name is’s [or was his name even peter?] AGI studio. With that, you can open old Sierra games, edit, excract, compile, and create your own coding, backgrounds, animations, etc. It’s the exact same enging Sierra used, according to the website, although since it was finished some odd number of years ago, nothing has been updated. It’s the program I used to make some of my first games, and helped me learn to program. Great program, try searching for it on google or somethin, cause I don’t remember the site. As for SCI Studio; I downloaded that I while ago, too, and was working on a game with it until I downloaded Adventure Game Studio, which is easier to use. I’ve still been waiting for B.P. to release the VGA version, cause his site hasn’t been updated in many months[last time I checked].
o_0
jimm -
(re: re: AGI Interpreter Recoding)
You mean Peter Kelly? He did much of the reverse engineering for AGI and wrote AGI Studio but lost interest several years ago. I don’t seem to recall him doing an interpreter, although there may be one. His docs on the AGI format make implementing an AGI interpreter relatively easy. I used them to make my AGI interpreter in just over a week.
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