King's Quest Omnipedia
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Background[]

  • This port is fairly basic direct port of the 1987 PC version.
  • This version has mouse support assuming you have a mouse. Which has a black with white outline arrow arrow for moving the character around or accessing pull-down menus (scummvm is capable of emulating the Atari ST O/S style mouse).
  • Music and sound effects are somewhere between the PC and Amiga version with bleeps and bloops. Maybe slightly better sound effects at points though.
  • It has unique hi-res screen transitions/screen washes between screens (the original pC version does not). The transition looks like hires pixellates out and then back in onto the next screen (note this may be something related to how system loads screens not necessarily something programmed into the game itself, see below). This may also be indicating that the graphics get doubled to fit the higher resolution of the Atari ST (320 × 200 with 16 out of 512 colors).
  • This game still uses 16 colors. However, due to the differences between PCs EGA or VGA compatiblity modes and Atari ST color modes, there are slightly differen colors that appear in certain places (but still only up to 16 colors per screen). This is largely due to colors not matching up on each system, and no attempts to match the colors. The same issue occurs on some of the other ports including Apple II and Apple IIGS versions. For example purple tend to look more pink. The fact that the system is just using defaulting to its basic colors can be seen by run any version SQ1 on scummvm, switching the colors between PC, Amiga, or Appple IIGS system modes, and seeing which colors default (for example running SQ2 PC version forced to run with Apple IIGS or Amiga colors, will produce colors matching those system colors despite that version of SQ2 predating those versions of SQ1). Surprisingly the other effects like different sizes of pixellated "screen wash" also appears when switching these modes, which may sugget that's a feature of how AppleIIGS, Amiga or Atari ST displays screens and not something necessarily special to those versions of the games themselves. So the screen washes are a product of 'emulation' of how each hardware functions.
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