Are you heading for an award for the posting with the least information?

😅
I can't find a suitable way to explain what happens!
Anyway, I'm using Windows XP 32 bit on an Athlon 64 X2. My video board is an integrated nVIDIA GeForce 6150SE.
This happens with both DosBox 0.72 and 0.73. Imagine a piece of graphics that has to change: it doesn't do so at once, but it goes back and forth 1 or 2 times, then it sets. The video should explain it better than a thousand words.

Thanks!

Anyway, I'm using Windows XP 32 bit on an Athlon 64 X2. My video board is an integrated nVIDIA GeForce 6150SE.
This happens with both DosBox 0.72 and 0.73.

Now we're at useful information 😉
I don't have the game but iirc. the problem you describe is known, maybe try
with different cycles (like cycles=10000) and change the core setting in your
dosbox config file.

And post in the proper section.

[MOVED]

Tried changing CPU core and cycles but it didn't help. I also tried every "machine type" setting. At last I solved the problem in Operation Stealth by setting MCGA instead of VGA in the game setup. This information might be useful for those who want to play the game in DosBox.
King's Quest VI doesn't have such an option, but it seems that just the intro is affected.
Thank you!

Use this driver

collector wrote:

Use this driver

Perfect!!!

Thank you!

OK, I'm curious now. I have a similar problem but I have no idea how to use this 'DRV' file you just posted. Any explanations?

You just need to unzip it into the game's directory. It is also included with my new installer for KQ6.

OK, thanks - but I don't get it - is this file generic for all Sierra games? What is this used for in general?

It is a VGA driver file. While a few are swappable between games, most cannot be.

Awesome! Thanks for the information and the posting of the file. It fixed the graphical glitches I was having in KQ VI as well. For the record, the following Sierra games also utilized the same VGA320.DRV file, and per my collection are dated older (And possibly glitchy as well):

Leisure Suit Larry 1 (VGA Remake)
Leisure Suit Larry 5
Space Quest IV
Space Quest V
Space Quest VI
King's Quest V
King's Quest VII

The only Sierra game which I have that contains a newer VGA320.DRV file than the one posted in this thread is Leisure Suit Larry 6.

Again, I greatly appreciate the information and details in this thread - much thanks to all!

Once again, great thread (helped fix a very subtle bug).

Where did you get this driver from? Was it originally a patch or did it come with a newer Sierra game or anything like it?

It was from another game of the same era. As I said, it usually does not work to swap drivers or executables between SCI games. Sierra usually heavily modified the interpreters and drivers to suit the needs of any given game, so much so that they stored the source for these with each game's source.

Yet another testimonial to their bad programming skills....

On the technical level, Lucasarts was far ahead of Sierra.

I recently read an article by Scott Bilas (GK3's project leader) who said:

"I can't stress this enough to developers: Build a scripting engine, even if you don't think you need one. Make it generic enough so that it can be reused in as many places as possible. I think many engineers are scared of building one because they think it will take too long to develop or that it will execute scripts too slowly. This was certainly the case with the original GK3 engineering team."

SCI games are much more buggy than SCUMM games, and it's because they're not nearly as generic as they should be. That's why over the years Sierra has released so many patches for their games, and Lucasarts hardly ever had to.

That doesn't mean that it was bad programming. If they needed a feature for a game that was not in the engine they added it in for that game. The SCI engine was a more complex engine than Scumm. Generally so was the scripting for the games themselves.

This does not absolve Sierra of all errors. By far, the majority of the errors found in the SCI games are the timer bugs in the VGA games. This was just bad practice to time events based on the system instead of something closer to real time, but as they said themselves, they didn't expect people to continue playing these games. The other thing that lead to bugs was that there was pressure from management (specifically from Ken, himself) to get products out the door even if they were not quite ready.

The buggiest game was QfG4. Most of the errors were timing bugs, but there were other ones too. It was also just about the most complex of all of the SCI games. More complex than most of the Adventure games. More complex than usual RPG. Multiply this by 3 to 4 times when you take into account the different classes of heroes. Then it was pushed out the door before the Coles felt it was ready. In spite of this, all of these non-timer bugs were addressed by the release of the CD version of the game.

All of this aside, the graphical glitch that this thread was started for has nothing to do with any of this. This glitch never occurred on a real DOS PC.

How could there be no bugs in QfG4 if they released the game when it didn't even have intro yet 😉