AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64

98 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by erickhill
(meanhamster.com)

13 Comments

JoshTriplett

6 hours ago

The only good AGI.

Impressive fitting into the machine. I wonder if SCI would be possible?

stuaxo

16 minutes ago

Now this is an AGI I can get behind.

bzzzt

4 hours ago

Only with some serious downgrading of the assets. I remember playing SCI games on an 8MHz XT class PC and everything ran dog slow. Some SCI games had optional animations that didn't play on a slow machine.

vkaku

44 minutes ago

We finally achieved AGI outside these AI companies on portable home computers

trollbridge

8 hours ago

The fusion of "64-bit architectures" and "64K total RAM machine" brings a bit of a smile to my face with projects with names like this.

hn974izqdv

an hour ago

Simple advice, hard to follow

a1o

9 hours ago

Wait, how? What is the background technology? I need more explanation. Is this a tool to recompile these games?

wzdd

9 hours ago

AGI is here and its first task is obviously completing the C64’s game library.

Not really. AGI is a game interpreter, like LucasArts’ SCUMM or Infocom’s z machine. Games are shipped as portable code and a machine specific AGI interpreter runs them. Looks like they’re preprocessing the graphics first, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Game_Interpreter

skissane

8 hours ago

Sierra released most of their AGI games on the Apple IIc/IIe. Given C64 is a roughly equivalently specced machine, there is no reason in principle why they couldn't have ported AGI to C64 as well – it just, for whatever reason, never happened. (One AGI game, "Donald Duck's Playground", was originally developed as a native C64 game, then AGI was used to port it to other platforms.)

Also, given different AGI platforms had different graphics capabilities, I expect even the original Sierra AGI games had somewhat different graphics assets on different platforms – so whatever preprocessing of graphics they are doing to make them C64-friendly, Sierra quite possibly would have done something like that anyway had they made a C64 port back in the day.

Firehawke

5 hours ago

If I recall correctly, the art is done with a form of early vector drawing so that they can use one set of assets on all platforms. They're designed to 16 colors but get downsampled for 4-color CGA mode or monochrome mode.

noufalibrahim

6 hours ago

I think the first instance of games being separated from the "engine" so that you could make the game and it would run on all platforms that the engine ran out without porting was Infocom's Z-machine. http://maher.filfre.net/if-book/if-4.htm

There was an interesting article which I read a long time. It's linked to from the post above called "How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine" published in 1980.

AGI, SCI, Scumm etc. were all larger and more capable versions of this.