[Arwen4CJ]

I have some questions -- (questions will be later on -- questions are in bold -- I'm just giving background information here so you have an idea of what's going on. I also have multiple questions -- some having to do with KQ 7, some having to do with playing it on a Mac, and some have to do with an Apple IIGS emulator).

(I'm going to have to break this up into several different posts because this post is too long, and it won't let me post it. Sorry about the double posting, but it's the only way to get this all in here.)

it's this thread that got me here. I used to play King's Quest 1-4 on an Apple IIGS. They didn't make any more games for the GS, so I couldn't play any KQ games after 4.

Then, when I was in high school, my family bought a computer with Windows 95. After we bought it, we happened to be in a computer game store and saw the King's Quest Collection for Windows. We bought that. It was three discs with all of the KQ games on it, plus other games. Everything worked fine on that computer. My family got a new computer a couple years later -- one that had Windows ME. As far as I remember, the KQ collection that we had worked fine on that.

I then bought a computer with XP on a couple years later. I tried playing the games on there, and although the games installed fine, KQ 1-3 (I don't think I checked the others) gave me garbled text, so I couldn't read any of the messages on the screen. (I don't remember if the remake of KQ 1 worked). I stopped playing the games because I couldn't play them on XP.

Then, this spring I got a new computer, but it was a MacBook. This was the first Apple computer I'd had since my family had gotten the Apple IIGS. I installed Windows XP on my Mac under VMWare Fusion. When I installed the King's Quest Collection on that, there was no garbled text, so the first games worked fine. I didn't try them all on the XP on the Mac because I came across another KQ collection that was supposed to work on XP. I thought that would be better, and I could play them on my old HP computers that had XP on them, and I could also install that version onto the Mac, assuming that it would be a better version. I saw that it ran all of the games from the hard drive instead of needing to use CD's.

After I had finished playing KQ 1, I was curious as to why my score was 159 when the highest score possible was 158 (I think that was the number -- I'm just going off of memory. My score was one higher than the listed possible score in the game.) So I googled it...and ended up coming across you tube videos that featured music and sounds only available on the Apple IIGS versions of the games. I watched the videos. It had been over 10 years since I did anything with the Apple IIGS, and played the King's Quest games on that computer. However, seeing the video reminded me of the IIGS, and I did remember the sounds and music on it. After hearing that, it made me want to find an Apple IIGS emulator to install on my computer, and play the games that way. The sound and music were no comparison to what I'd just been playing in the KQ collections for Windows. Bells actually sounded like bells. Birds chirping sounded like birds chirping. The bad guy music was much better. I could also hear things like doors closing. This was all in the emulated GS on youtube.

This led me to a search on youtube for Apple IIGS emulators. I don't think the Apple II emulator that came with the first KQ collection I had would have played the GS versions, but I might be wrong. What I wanted to do was to find an emulator that I could play from the Mac OS instead of having to play it in XP. I found a couple -- one was Sweet16 and another one was Kegs. There was also a Virtual Apple II site that had games I could play through the Firefox browser. If I wanted to play the games outside of the browser, in an actual emulator, I had to find the disk images. After doing some searching, I found a way to connect the Apple IIGS to my MacBook. I used ADTPro with a serial cable. I wanted to get the disk images off of the actual, real original Apple IIGS disks. I was able to get this all working. The only problem was that disk 1 of King's Quest 2 wouldn't play on the emulator because of some sort of copy protection issue. It told me it needed the original disk. However, I copied it off of the original disk, so I don't understand what the problem was. (This was in Kegs).

I looked for disk images that I could use online, and I found a few. The Sweet16 emulator had a problem when it tried to run that disk, and only that disk. It caused the emulated AppleIIGS to freeze after it was mounted. None of the other disks did this. The same thing happened when it tried to run my own version of disk 1.

However, playing it in Kegs cleared up the problem. It played on Kegs fine -- but when I loaded it on Kegs, it said that the size was 0 instead of the expected whatever it was. But that didn't impact the ability of it to play the game. I didn't play the emulated Apple IIGS versions all the way through..I just checked to see that they worked.

I couldn't get my Apple II version of KQ I to run at all in the emulator, presumably because of a copy protection on the disk. The version of KQ 1 that I had on the Apple IIGS was actually not the GS version of the game. Rather, it was the IIe version of the game, coming on 5.25 floppies. I don't know if I can find a disk image of that one online.

Does anyone know how to get passed the copy protection on these games? The disk images all copied over to my computer fine...they just won't play in the emulators. I found a GS copy of a disk image of KQ 1, but not the version of the game that I had. I'm glad I found the GS version of it, though.