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Hi. Like many here, I grew up on Sierra games and always wanted to be a game designer for them. When I was 13, I actually started work on a deeply ambitious (see: mostly ripped off from Gabriel Knight) game design. I even went so far as to call Sierra tech support and ask where I should submit a game design to!
As a kid/young teen, my biggest dream was to visit Sierra in Oakhurst and also see Coarsegold, where it all began. Of course, I lived in South Dakota, and my family never went on vacation to California.
Now, however, I live and work in California and was contemplating taking a weekend trip up north to Oakhurst. I know everything is closed there, but I am wondering if there is anything there worth seeing. I feel a very strong nostalgia for Sierra and I just want to see what’s there.
Does anyone know anything about this?
TV
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“… (by Todd VDW)
Now, however, I live and work in California and was contemplating taking a weekend trip up north to Oakhurst. I know everything is closed there, but I am wondering if there is anything there worth seeing. I feel a very strong nostalgia for Sierra and I just want to see what’s there.Does anyone know anything about this?
TV…”I visited Oakhurt back when Sierra was in its heyday. My dad and I were passing through on the way back from Yosemite and we went to the office to check it out. Unfortunately the tours were done for the day and we had to move on. I did manage to get the ear of a nice customer service rep who listened to my tale about how all of my Sierra games wouldn’t work on my newfangled VGA display because the disks were only written to use CGA or Tandy/PCjr graphics modes. Trust me you do NOT want to play a Sierra game in CGA. Anyway, she actually shipped me replacements for all of my games. THAT was cool.
But I digress. Is the city worth visiting? Well Oakhurst is a nice, small, remote town. I imagine the only reason it holds up without Sierra is because of the tourists passing through to Yosemite. The home prices out there are kind of ridiculous…right now a decent 1500 sq ft place will probably be $250K+. But then again this is California. I could probably retire there, but I wouldn’t make a special trip just to check it out. If anything, make plans for a guided muleback trip in Yosemite and hit Oakhurst on your way up. Otherwise, if you want to scratch your nostalgia itch, play some of the old school Sierra stuff and if you’ve got any questions, Ken is pretty good about answering inquiries in the Ask Ken section of this board.
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Slightly off topic, but Sierra’s AGI games TOTALLY ROCKED in CGA compared to what the competition was doing.
Usually CGA games are limited to displaying only four “colours” on screen at once (the techies among you are free to correct me on this) from a total palette of seven (white, black, turquoise, pink, red, yellow, green. Sierra however used a nifty trick whereby its games had access to the full CGA palette. Meaning all of these colours could be displayed on screen at once, whereas a Lucasarts (or anyone else for that matter) title, when running under CGA, only had access to four colours at a time (and they always had to use one specific combination meaning either black, white, turquoise and pink; or black, yellow, red and green). As an example, compare Maniac Mansion (or what have you) to Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards or any other AGI game (DOSBox has a CGA mode, though I’ve never tested it).
Now, a question: why didn’t Sierra continue using this trick for its SCI games?
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“… (by Johann de Waal) Slightly off topic, but Sierra’s AGI games TOTALLY ROCKED in CGA compared to what the competition was doing.Usually CGA games are limited to displaying only four “colours” on screen at once (the techies among you are free to correct me on this) from a total palette of seven (white, black, turquoise, pink, red, yellow, green. Sierra however used a nifty trick whereby its games had access to the full CGA palette. Meaning all of these colours could be displayed on screen at once, whereas a Lucasarts (or anyone else for that matter) title, when running under CGA, only had access to four colours at a time (and they always had to use one specific combination meaning either black, white, turquoise and pink; or black, yellow, red and green). As an example, compare Maniac Mansion (or what have you) to Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards or any other AGI game (DOSBox has a CGA mode, though I’ve never tested it).
Now, a question: why didn’t Sierra continue using this trick for its SCI games?
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You are correct about the palette of a CGA adapter, but the early Sierra games didn’t use CGA – they were exploiting an extended graphics mode that was specfic to the PCjr. That is 320x200x16c (http://mail.magnaspeed.net/~mbbrutman/PCjr/pcjr_hardware.html ), which is pretty much the same as EGA. If you played the games on anything other than one of those adapters you’d get the game in “glorious” 4-color CGA, a total nightmare to behold. The AGI engine actually painted the screens at 160x200x16c. I think this was done for size/memory considerations rather than an actual limit on the display adapter. The Tandy also had this adapter and also supported the same 16 color modes.
The PCjr got this special treatment because IBM approached Sierra to make a game that showcased the capabilities (16 color graphics, 3 voice sound) of the PCjr.
***Sidenote: DOSBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net ) is capable of emulating the old 3 voice sound generator in the PCjr. So if you want to hear your old AGI games in all their 3 voice musical glory, check them out in DOSBox.**
IBM pretty much financed the development and marketing of the game, which was called King’s Quest. Eventually, the PCjr and Tandy dropped by the wayside and the AGI engine was updated to support the industry-standard EGA adapter. Sierra didn’t use the CGA “trick” for SCI games because they didn’t need to anymore. The EGA display was industry standard and Tandys and PCjrs didn’t have enough memory to meet the requirements (512K!!!!) of the new engine anyway.
I remember when that happened. I was cruising along with my PCjr and read in a mag that KQ4 was coming out. I got pretty excited until I found out my computer would need a ton up upgrades to play it, if not outright replacing. Money wasn’t exactly coming out of my ears since I was 12 or 13 at the time, so I wrote a letter to Ken. Much to my surprise, he responded, but sadly did not feel like changing the course of the company for me so as to keep making games that would run on my PCjr. He did say that they were rolling out an AGI version of KQ4, but come on – SCI was what I wanted. So I bothered my dad until be shelled out for a 386/16 with 40MB HD, 256K VGA card, and 1MB of RAM to the tune of $2500. Not much has changed in that games STILL drive the hardware market 🙂
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Thanks for the info, Chris. But are you sure about only the PCjr having the capability to display the extended palette? We only had a bog standard IBM-compatible PC with an Intel 8088 CPU and CGA graphics adapter.
I remember reading somewhere (on this site perhaps?) that it was some kind of smart software thing that Sierra did.
Later, when we got VGA, and could now play the AGI games in EGA, the graphics was a big improvement even over the extended CGA. The EGA and CGA graphics looked very different, and not similar as you mention.
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“… (by Johann de Waal) Thanks for the info, Chris. But are you sure about only the PCjr having the capability to display the extended palette? We only had a bog standard IBM-compatible PC with an Intel 8088 CPU and CGA graphics adapter.I remember reading somewhere (on this site perhaps?) that it was some kind of smart software thing that Sierra did.
Later, when we got VGA, and could now play the AGI games in EGA, the graphics was a big improvement even over the extended CGA. The EGA and CGA graphics looked very different, and not similar as you mention.
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Actually, Johann you were ‘nearly’ correct.
The IBM-compatible CGA modes that Sierra used only supported four of the colours from the total palette, but also used a technique called dithering to make it look like a richer palette was being used. The CGA mode used was 320×200 with 4 colours, and each horizontal pixel was two pixels wide. Dithering meant some parts of the scene had two colours painted next to each other in these “double pixels”.
For example, when you fill a rock like this (basically a whole series of vertical two-colour stripes) the colours start mixing together and looking like they are a different colour shade. The human eye tricks your brain into thinking it is a different colour on the screen.
I too loved the Sierra AGI games because it made my four-colour CGA look way better than what most games made it look like.
One of the reasons this couldn’t work effectively with SCI was because SCI didn’t have the blocky two-pixels-equals-one screen layout and thus the dithering would only work in areas that had large filled areas. The much more detailed graphics in the SCI games meant that a lot of screens wouldn’t have been able to make use of this technique.
As a side-note there was also a way of hacking the CGA to get 16 colours at a resolution of 160×100 (I think). A couple of games such as Moonbugs used this mode. There is more info about it on mobygames.
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“… (by Johann de Waal) Thanks for the info, Chris. But are you sure about only the PCjr having the capability to display the extended palette? We only had a bog standard IBM-compatible PC with an Intel 8088 CPU and CGA graphics adapter.I remember reading somewhere (on this site perhaps?) that it was some kind of smart software thing that Sierra did.
Later, when we got VGA, and could now play the AGI games in EGA, the graphics was a big improvement even over the extended CGA. The EGA and CGA graphics looked very different, and not similar as you mention.
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Yes, I’m sure. When you played the old Sierra games on a PCjr or a Tandy, they looked identical to the EGA version you remember. Remember, the original AGI engine was WRITTEN for that oddball graphics card to showcase the PCjr. The problems came when I tried to take those old AGI games and play them on my new computer with VGA. Since there was no support for EGA on the orginal AGI engine, the graphics got kicked down to 4-color CGA – a blinding sight for me since up to then I was quite used to the full 16 color palette.
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