Any luck throwing them at the HX-DOS extenders? AGS Windows still used Allegro around that time IIRC.

Never heard of that thanks leilei. I guess i gotta try that!

Well, i tried the HX Extenders, but no luck. Only way would be to recompile the games on AGS version 2.62, which was the last version to support DOS.

A shame since King's Quest 3, Quest for Glory 2 and Space Quest 2 look amazing.

Well, i wouldn't recommend that because AGS has come a long way on bug fixes and speed (opengl renderer) and linux portability.

But on the other hand it still has a major incompatibility with the opengl renderer and some old games using a bad idea from older times (some few objects in some have broken z-depth).

The games that were using LUA or 'private' pascal extensions are broken forever though (fortunately marginal).

Since i gave up on the few games that have broken plugins/extensions there are very few problems with the engine that the devs haven't addressed quickly.

1 is the allegro MIDI synthesizer, which is needed if you don't have a MIDI deamon running (as i never will, waste of cpu). This synthesizer is broken by design because it requires the soundbanks to be on $HOME, instead of the game dir or something.
The other is that z-order problem, which is rare and can be avoided with the software renderer (which is slow on weak computers though).

In fact the major 'modern' issue the engine has is that unity is eating its 2d pixel adventure lunch (not much to do with that) and that one particular studio (Raw Fury, the makers of Kathy Rain and Whispers of a Machine) seems determined to fork and break stuff with hacks to get things 'working' instead of collaborating upstream when they need a feature.

Compiling for 2.62 indeed wouldn't be a realistic option. Many of the functions have changed or been deprecated and replaced by better functions that work entirely differently. The entire game would have to be largely rescripted. Newer games use plugins that I don't think would work in DOS either.