King's Quest II Tandy 1000 SX Real Hardware Playthrough

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Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

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Published on July 20, 2021 2:55:23 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kC_q7BzTW8

Game:

King's Quest II (1985)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 1:33:06

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King's Quest II Tandy 1000 SX Real Hardware Playthrough

Here is a complete playthrough of King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne. I captured this video running off my Tandy 1000 SX. I recorded this playthrough in two sessions, the second session beginning when I restored the game after being killed by Hagatha for the first time. For the first session, I ran the SX at its native "Fast" 7.16MHz speed. For the second session I believe I ran the SX at the "Slow" 4.77MHz speed. The CPU was the 8088, which came with the system, no V20s or 286 Express Cards used here (although I own both). I did not notice much in the way of speed differences between the two sessions.

King's Quest II is doubly significant. First, it was the first game which actually used the AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) engine. Its predecessor, King's Quest, may look like it uses AGI but underneath the hood it uses an engine called GDL (Game Development Language). Also, while King's Quest was developed as a prestige exclusive title for the IBM PCjr., King's Quest II was developed when the Tandy 1000 had been released and was rapidly eclipsing the PCjr. The game is much more enjoyable to play on the Tandy because the Tandy's performance is not bogged down like the PCjr.'s.

This version of King's Quest II is one of the booter versions, which may be somewhat unfamiliar to most people compared to the DOS installable versions which were released later. The booter versions were released in 1985 whereas the first known DOS version was from 1987. In the booter versions there are no mid-screen text boxes, no drop-down menus, no status bars and no help or about screens. The score is only displayed on the inventory screen. While some function keys do useful things, (F1 – Sound On/Off, F3 – Save Game, F5 – Load Game, F7 – Restart Game, F9 – Repeat last typed input, Tab – Show Inventory) I found just typing in commands works just as well. In order to change Graham's walking speed, you must type "Slow", "Normal" or "Fast".

There is a previous booter version, 1.0W, and a Tandy Corp.-branded version which is otherwise identical to this version, v1.1H. I prefer later versions of original releases most of the time because they usually fix bugs, but I like to play games as they were first released and before major changes were made.

King's Quest II's booter versions came on two 5.25" disks. I appreciate the way Sierra handled the disk swapping, namely except for the one time when you have to boot the game, you will only swap disks when you have to go outside the "main Kolyma" screens. Disk 1 is only accessed when you go under the sea, the top of the mountain, the interior of Dracula's castle and the land beyond the doors. Game saving is done by preparing a separate save disk using the in-game command "init disk". This requires disk swapping, apparently Sierra never considered allowing the save disk to reside on Drive B:

The booter versions have coarser and slower tempo music than the later DOS versions. I think I got all the music played by the game and most of the sound effects and the various screens. To get everything I had to die at least once! I am not using a walkthrough and relying on my memory to progress through the game, so this playthrough is not the most efficient.

When I enter and leave the screen with Hagatha's cave a few times, I am trying to trigger a most famous easter egg. In this version, there is no easter egg on the mountain top or hole in the rock where you “view” the easter egg. The game advertised on the sign in the woods is different than those advertised in the DOS versions.

The BIOS text display had half its horizontal resolution taken away when I was processing this video, I only kept that bit to show the speed of the program loading. In future I can avoid this unnecessary loss of detail for recording booter games by activating the "TV Mode" during the Tandy 1000's memory count, which sets the text display to 40 column, 200 line mode instead of the default 80 column, 225 line mode.

I wanted to show this on original hardware so people can get a sense of how fast the game ran on the ideal near-contemporary hardware. King's Quest II was released in 1985 and the Tandy 1000 SX in 1986. I edited out the restore game and backtracking when I died, but the restore game process does not take any longer than loading a screen other than the need to swap the save disk in and out The game is running off a .hfe floppy images and a Gotek Floppy Emulator with the HxC firmware installed. I imaged these disks from my original disks and in the .hfe format they retain their Superlok protection.

Captured with an RGB2HDMI and a Datapath E1s.

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