This is a weird one. SQ4 refuses to run in color on this system. Every other dos game (including other sierra titles like king's quest) works normally.
ATI Graphics Ultra
AMD 386SX-25
8MB RAM
I've got the graphics ultra eeprom set to color vga.
Hmm that is odd but have run into many oddities with some early ATI cards. Any thing prior to later Rage chipsets seemed to have issues in one game or another from my experience. I have an Oak OTI87 based 1Mb that never has an issue with anything yet, a bit slow compared to other ISA cards but compatibility is excellent with old DOS games !
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
please check the config-file directly. perhaps "320bw" driver is set and the cfg is read only?
Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines
The VGA320.DRV video driver in SQ4 has a test that can cause it to automatically switch to grayscale mode, and it appears your video card is triggering the switch. The test is to set a palette index (200) to specific RGB values through a BIOS function and then read the index to check if the RGB values match. For whatever reason, your video hardware or BIOS is returning different values than the ones that were set. Maybe it's a bug in the video BIOS, or maybe you can think of some feature that could be affecting the palette and then disable that.
Other Sierra games from 1991 have a VGA320.DRV that does not have the palette test, and instead include a separate VGA320BW.DRV for grayscale operation. I tested copying VGA320.DRV from the SQ1 remake to SQ4 in DOSBox, and SQ4 seems to work okay with that driver, so perhaps it could be a relatively easy workaround for you.
awesome info! thanks!
