Playthrough - Adventure in Serenia IBM PC/XT w/Composite CGA

Channel:

Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

Subscribers:

982

Published on July 11, 2019 4:22:41 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIessSWuABE

Game:

Wizard and the Princess (1980)

Duration: 28:45

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I have heard that there are no proper captures of Sierra Online's Adventure in Serenia on Youtube. I am here to rectify that.

Adventure in Serenia is Sierra Online's port of Wizard and the Princess to the IBM PC. It was ported by Sierra and published by IBM as one of the first games for the IBM PC. Originally the game was released as a self-booting disk, but I am playing a DOS conversion from NewRisingSun to cut down on the loading times.

This game requires a CGA card, but specifically it was designed for the IBM Color/Graphics Adapter. And because it was being developed in 1981-82, it looks ideal with the old-style IBM CGA card using composite color output. This card outputs composite color differently to later cards. There is a text-only mode which you can access with F1 and RGB-friendly graphics can be displayed with F2. I display them briefly near the beginning of the video. The RGB-friendly graphics are very composite-unfriendly. Typically when games intended to use CGA composite color they would use the 320x200 mode using the cyan/magenta/white palette or the 640x200 mode with white as the foreground color.

Capturing old IBM CGA requires a bit of work. The signal is rather "hot", I bled it down by using a Y-splitter to split the signal between my capture card and TV. Most capture cards will show only very washed out colors with default settings, so I boosted the saturation up quite a bit to get a colorful image.

Loading and saving a game originally required a separate disk to be formatted by the program. The conversion saves games to a file which can be located anywhere.

There is no music and only the occasional sound effect.

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