While King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella SCI featured SCI's higher resolution graphics as well as AdLib and Roland MT-32 music with a "full soundtrack" by William Goldstein, many users had older systems that did not meet the hardware requirements of SCI. Hardware began to advance beyond what AGI could utilize, so Sierra began development on its next engine, SCript Interpreter or later Sierra Creative Interpreter (SCI). A year before the last official AGI game, Manhunter 2: San Francisco in 1989, Sierra released the first SCI (SCI0) game, King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella in 1988. In keeping with Moore's Law, SCI could take advantage of the constantly increasing capabilities of the new hardware. As with AGI in its day, SCI was a big leap forward in technology. SCI's 200px x 320px vector graphics allowed for noticeably better graphics over AGI's 160px x 200px. While still just 16 colors, but SCI0 introduced dithering, which mixed pixels of different colors into the same fill areas that gave the effect of more than 16 colors.
KQ4AGI Fisherman's Shack
KQ4SCI Fisherman's Shack
Sound
SCI introduced support for the new sound cards. This expanded its audio capabilities over that of AGI's three voice with noise channel sound PCjr/Tandy sound. With the advent SCI, music became an inseparable part of Sierra games. Even though the first exposure most had was with AdLib's hoots and honks, it also supported the MPU-401, which allowed Sierra's composers to create some amazing Roland MT-32 sound tracks. KQ4's MT-32 track gave a quality to the game's music that at the time was unsurpassed.
KQ4 AGI Intro
KQ4 SCI Intro
KQ4 AGI Dwarves's Mine
KQ4 SCI Dwarves's Mine
Graphics
Sound
Requirements
MS-DOS
width="200" | Minimum OS:
Minimum CPU:
Intel 8088 / 8086 8mhz
Minimum RAM:
256 KB
Minimum Video RAM:
N/A
Graphics Modes:
Hercules, CGA, PCjr, Tandy / PCjr, EGA, VGA
Audio Hardware:
PC Speaker,Tandy/PCjr Sound, Game Blaster (CMS)[1]
No Official Patch
SHP New King's Quest 4 DOSBox Installer Setup File [742 KB]
