is it just space quest? have you tried any other AGI titles? how about SCI games?

Kq1 kq2 kq3 sq1 sq2

It happens in all of the agi games that I have tried so far

Sq3 and up, kq 4 and up all work fine

This also happens if I restart in msdos mode

That happens when your ROM BIOS does not have the standard 8x8 font stored at F000:FA6E.

Attempted a bios update, no change. I’m guessing the bios is not compatible with these games. No fun.

But why does the inverted font work…?

That’s a good question. Lol is the inverted font coded into the game but basic font is from bios to save space in the game? Or be faster to render?

By the looks of it, the inverted text could be from the video ROM, which has its own complete 8x8 font. (At F000:FA6E, the system ROM only provides the first 128 characters.)

So it all depends on which methods/calls AGI uses to print text. I guess in theory it could be patched to always use the video ROM font on EGA/VGA.

root42 wrote:

But why does the inverted font work…?

Because AGI games use the BIOS to display white-on-black text, which will always use the correct font data. But for black-on-white text, AGI writes the font pattern data to video memory by itself, because some BIOSes don't to that properly. And in doing so, AGI assumes that the font data exists at the same location where it existed in the original 1981 PC BIOS, which is F000:FA6E.

If your AGI version is 2.912 or higher, try running the game with the command-line option "-s -v", as in e.g. "sq2 -s -v". That will run the game in IBM PS/2 mode, where the game (I think) will use a different routine to print text.

Awesome! The -s -v worked and corrected the issue.

Update and resolution:

The above resolution did not fix all games, but did most of them.

I have been able to resolve this issue 100% by using scumming as a windows based interpreter for it. I did have to grab version 1.8.1 for windows 9x compatibility.

Sorry to bring up this old thread again. I just want to add that -s -v caused the garbled text to become a wall of solid black on my setup. Is this related to the VGA card itself now or is it strictly the motherboard chipset/BIOS? I have a Voodoo3 PCI on an Intel X58 motherboard chipset. I was wondering if I should try to find an even older PCI VGA card that has better luck with these Sierra AGI games.

Cheers!