Playthrough King's Quest V 256-color Floppy Real MS-DOS Machine & Roland MT-32

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Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

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Published on February 19, 2020 11:38:54 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEU1mPtzMoI

Game:

King's Quest V (1990)

Duration: 2:07:30

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Here I have recorded a full playthough, with maximum score, of Sierra's King's Quest V - Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. This is its original version, taken from a set of disks I personally dumped and installed. The version is 0.000.051 and the Int# is 11.9.90. As this is a first release, you will see a few bugs.

My copy came on nine 5.25" 1.2MiB disks and also had a 3.5" 720KiB disk for systems with a 3.5" drive and a 5.25" drive to run the game entirely off floppy disk. The game was very large by the standards of its day and there were options for a partial or full install to a hard drive.

This game was a tour de force for the IBM VGA graphics standard when it was first released in late 1990. Sierra had previously used line vector drawing techniques in its 16-color SCI games, but for 256-color SCI games it scanned in paintings for the backgrounds. The VGA standard was originally released in 1987 but it took a few years to catch on and become affordable for games to take full use of it. Sierra was one of the first companies to produce games which utilized the full potential of VGA's 320x200 256 color mode. Because the 486DX2/66MHz system I am using to run the game is a bit noisy, you may see some noise in large areas of solid colors.

Sound is also a highlight of King's Quest V. It supported Adlib, MT-32, Tandy Sound, Game Blaster and PC Speaker. There is also an IBM Music Feature patch for the game, but it sounds truly awful. Here I am using my rev 0 MT-32 for all game audio. The rev 0 MT-32 is the ideal Roland LA Synthesis module to use for this game because some of the games sound effects ("Whippoorwill") utilize quirks of the rev 0 MT-32 to sound right. SCI1 and later games from Sierra no longer require an Intelligent MPU-401 interface and King's Quest V does not use digitized Sound Blaster sounds, so I am quite comfortable with using a Sound Blaster 16 and a Gameport-to-MIDI cable to connect the MT-32.

I have captured King's Quest V with a Datapath VisionRGB E1s, which is one of the best ways to capture analog VGA output. I captured at 720x400, cropped out the borders to get 640x400 and then upscaled nearest neighbor to 1920x1400 and added 20 pixels of border to top and bottom to get the final output resolution of 1920x1440. I have found that the 1440p resolution produces very sharp captures, and the 1920x1400 resolution gives a pixel aspect ratio of 1.371:1, which preserves the intended aspect ratio for DOS VGA games like this one very well.

My purpose in making videos like these is to show people how I believe capturing vintage games should be done, especially with longplays and playthroughs. There are enough emulator playthroughs of popular games like these. We have the resources to capture games run on original hardware, so we should show the games running on hardware they were originally meant to use. Several playthroughs only support 480 resolution, leading to soft images. I've seen playthroughs use scalers like Scale2x, something rarely supported by original games. VGA games run in 70Hz, but as Youtube does not support 70Hz, they should at least be run in 60Hz but few playthroughs manage this.

Most playthroughs of this game use the CD-ROM version. I prefer to focus on a game's first introduction to the general public. The 256-color floppy version was state of the art when it was released, that is what the magazines reviewed and the general public had the opportunity to experience the game for the first time. The CD-ROM version, released in 1991, was playable by relatively few PC owners due to the expense of CD-ROM drives. Here you get to see the copy protection instead.

King's Quest V is the first Sierra adventure game to use a point & click interface, which makes for a more friendly interface. However, while the interface may be more inviting than a text parser, King's Quest V was designed by Roberta Williams. Roberta had been designing adventure games for over ten years by the time KQ5 was put on the shelves. She designed games to maximize playing time by designing obtuse inventory puzzles, frequent deaths and game breaking situations. The puzzles in KQ5 are not bad overall, most of the solutions are logical or reasonable, but there are a few goofy ones.

The game is, however, still rather vindictive, lacking little more mercy than Mordack when it comes to player error. I have tried to show the many, many ways the game can kill you, and I only missed a few. I did not show the many ways you can perform or fail to perform an action which will break the game at a later point. One obnoxious example is when you get hungry and can eat either the pie or the lamb. If you eat the pie you cannot complete the game. If you fail to rescue the rat, which you only have second to do, game over. Miss a single-pixel item like the gold coin, fish hook or locket, tough luck. If you see Mannanan before you knock out the blue beast, best Restore Game.

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