Alley Cat? There are a handful of Sierra pre AGI games ported to PC, like Adventure in Serenia (Wizard and the Princess), Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, the original Oil's Well, Mickey's Space Adventure and Winnie the Pooh.

I would say Wolfenstein 3D (because of the 8088 hack) but it obviously wasn't designed for that and then I read you're using a PCjr...

I did see Oil's Well, maybe I'll go back and play it but I'm not much of an arcade player. Alley cat is the same kind of deal, but it is a classic. The other two are a bit juvenile aren't they? 🤣 Maybe just me but I prefer games that are more geared towards adults (Strategy games, text adventures and simulations, I'll play the occasional arcade game though).

DracoNihil wrote:

I would say Wolfenstein 3D (because of the 8088 hack) but it obviously wasn't designed for that and then I read you're using a PCjr...

Yeah unfortunately it all has to fit on a 360k floppy diskette (Or a few in the case where games had you swap disks) since the PCjr has no HDD without modification.
Besides I'd prefer the games to be playable. 😜

Adventure in Serenia and Ulysses and the Golden Fleece were not intended for children. They are adventure games. Adventure in Serenia had themes that were reused for KQ5, right down to the name of the town. They were two of the "Hi-Res Adventure" series that started with Mystery House.

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/sierra-hi-res-adventures

Any of the EGA Sierra Online games
Secret of Monkey Island EGA
Space Station Oblivion
Zork and Hitchhikers Guide
Altered Destiny
Winter Games
Gunship!
Larry Bird vs Dr. J
Heroes of the Lance
Three Stooges
Timequest
bad CGA arcade conversions of Buck Rogers and Contra
688 sub game
Oregon Trail
The oldest "Where in X is Carmen Sandiago?"
Thexder
Sorcerian
silpheed
ultima 1-3
wizardry

I should mention I don't have a mouse for the PCjr, so click to adventures are not going to work unfortunately. 🙁

Yeah, the AGI games should do OK on it. None of the games I listed use a mouse.

I did see those now that I think about it while perusing the games by year, I should go back and try them.

King_Corduroy wrote:

I should mention I don't have a mouse for the PCjr, so click to adventures are not going to work unfortunately. 🙁

Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 & 2, Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, and King's Quest 1-4 all used text parsers and arrow keys. You can play these fine.

I'm pretty sure a good many I listed are keyboard friendly, since I remember playing these on my 8088 XT, back in the day.

/*TWO* 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. No swapping out the DOS disk. Aw, yeah...

Cool! I just assumed you had to have a mouse for those. Thanks! 😁

Sierra did issue some VGA remakes of their classic series. Avoid those, since you'll be needing to play the low res EGA versions. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).

Got to mobygames, and filter by DOS, and by year, and you should find tons you can play.

Technically I have gotten Frogger, Defender and Lode Runner to run but they are much too fast to play even though the PCjr only runs at 4mhz.

I assume you are running a PCjr. with more than 128KB of RAM. Try running those games with only the 128KB of RAM (either with a booter or without loading your memory driver in DOS). They should become quite a bit more manageable. Defender stinks without a joystick.

Any true serial mouse works with the PCjr., so long as you have the PCjr Serial Port adapter.

Secret of Monkey Island is way too slow to run on a PCjr., so is 688 Attack Sub and Silpheed. Sorcerian will not run at all on a Tandy or PCjr. Ultima IV runs well enough as does Wizardry I-V.

Adventure in Serenia and Ulysses and the Golden Fleece were not intended for children.

Considering how ridiculous those games are, I would argue they were not intended for human beings. The Disney games are pretty neat.

Yeah unfortunately it all has to fit on a 360k floppy diskette (Or a few in the case where games had you swap disks) since the PCjr has no HDD without modification.

Get a jrIDE and your disk problems are solved.

ElectricMonk wrote:

Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 & 2, Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, and King's Quest 1-4 all used text parsers a […]
Show full quote

King_Corduroy wrote:

I should mention I don't have a mouse for the PCjr, so click to adventures are not going to work unfortunately. 🙁

Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 & 2, Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, and King's Quest 1-4 all used text parsers and arrow keys. You can play these fine.

I'm pretty sure a good many I listed are keyboard friendly, since I remember playing these on my 8088 XT, back in the day.

/*TWO* 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. No swapping out the DOS disk. Aw, yeah...

Remember that the SCI0 games have higher requirements than AGI. That is why Sierra developed both AGI and SCI versions of KQ4, so that those that could not meet the high hardware demands of their new engine could still play the game. The packages state a 286 minimum requirement, though you could run it on somewhat underpowered machines with less than ideal results. Some of the early SCI0 games did ship with drivers for Tandy and less frequently PCjr.

QfG was the last SCI0 game, but the systems engineers had added elements of SCI1. The SCI game list on ScummVM's Wiki erroneously lists it as SCI1 EGA, but that is only because the about message says SCI1. Internally, the interpreter IDs as SCI0. According to Cory Cole the game was in development near the transition to SCI1, but Ken wanted it out of the door before Christmas, so they could not wait. Staying with SCI0 also let them keep the parser for II, but the SCI1 elements made it a more demanding game.

Spacewar!

collector wrote:

ElectricMonk wrote:

Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 & 2, Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, and King's Quest 1-4 all used text parsers a […]
Show full quote

King_Corduroy wrote:

I should mention I don't have a mouse for the PCjr, so click to adventures are not going to work unfortunately. 🙁

Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 & 2, Quest for Glory 1 & 2, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, and King's Quest 1-4 all used text parsers and arrow keys. You can play these fine.

I'm pretty sure a good many I listed are keyboard friendly, since I remember playing these on my 8088 XT, back in the day.

/*TWO* 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. No swapping out the DOS disk. Aw, yeah...

Remember that the SCI0 games have higher requirements than AGI. That is why Sierra developed both AGI and SCI versions of KQ4, so that those that could not meet the high hardware demands of their new engine could still play the game. The packages state a 286 minimum requirement, though you could run it on somewhat underpowered machines with less than ideal results. Some of the early SCI0 games did ship with drivers for Tandy and less frequently PCjr.

QfG was the last SCI0 game, but the systems engineers had added elements of SCI1. The SCI game list on ScummVM's Wiki erroneously lists it as SCI1 EGA, but that is only because the about message says SCI1. Internally, the interpreter IDs as SCI0. According to Cory Cole the game was in development near the transition to SCI1, but Ken wanted it out of the door before Christmas, so they could not wait. Staying with SCI0 also let them keep the parser for II, but the SCI1 elements made it a more demanding game.

Yeah, I remember them being pokey until i upgraded to a 286 w/VGA. But they were still playable, because I played all of them to completion on my XT. (Except maybe KQ4).

I bought the 286, mainly for Monkey Island 2, and the added bonus of Sierra putting out 256 color games at the same time. Win/Win.

I just remembered a few more:

Archon
Wasteland
Bard's Tale
Karateka
Rogue
those sports games by Epyx

I'd suggest changing the topic, because is misleading. Why?

I remember playing Wing Commander, Elf, Magic Johnson and other games on an Olivetti PCS86 (that's a 10 Mhz Nec V30, 640k, with hard disk and VGA video card). I think that games should work on 8088s... but if they had enough RAM and that VGA card. The IBM PCjr had a "enhaced" CGA and much less memory, so most of that games won't work properly on that computer.

Well I only have a PCjr when it comes to true DOS machines, so I have to make due.
I see what you mean though, but it was kinda supposed to make people want to read it. 😜 I mean the more people providing input the better right?

I suppose what I'm looking for are other great strategy games like Empire or something I can just really dive into. I mean when I was younger I used to play Red Alert for days on end running skirmishes and tweaking unit properties, it was like an awesome warfare sim and that is kind of what I like about Empire: Wargame of the century. The randomness, it's just so enticing every time you start a new game wondering how this is going to end up. Plus the interface is intuitive, it uses CGA graphics and doesn't have a steep learning curve (Not that I have a problem with reading a manual 😜 ).

I am just consistantly amazed that such an awesome game runs flawlessly on my PCjr, that I'm just looking around for the games Interstel must have used as stepping stones you know? It just blows my mind that the only thing kinda close in is Utopia on the Intelevision which came out in 1981.