What program do I need to run these AGI fan made games, or a game I'm making myself?You will need an original Sierra interpreter taken from one of their games or one of the free interpreters made by AGI fans.
To use Sierra's interpreter, take these files from one of their games: AGI, HGC_FONT, SIERRA.COM, AGIDATA.OVL, CGA_GRAF.OVL, EGA_GRAF.OVL, HGC_GRAF.OVL, HGC_OBJS.OVL, IBM_OBJS.OVL, JR_GRAF.OVL, VG_GRAF.OVL
Depending on what system you have, you may not need all these files, but it's better safe than sorry. This interpreter supports Tandy and PC speaker, EGA/CGA/Hercules and PC games. Depending on the game, you may need to tweak the game.id (future FAQ).
At the moment there are three main AGI interpreters currently being working on: AGIL, NAGI and Sarien. They all run under Windows but only AGIL and Sarien run under Linux and other operating systems. Currently Sarien runs on the most systems, NAGI has the best compatibility (I wrote it but I'm trying to be objective) and AGIL catching up very fast on both fronts. It is possible to finish games on all three interpreters.
AGIL:
http://www.elite.za.net/ NAGI:
http://members.dingoblue.net.au/~sonneveld/nagi/ Sarien:
http://sarien.sourceforge.net/ How legal are these games? Can I take a few pictures and objects from Sierra's games? Is it alright to bundle an interpreter with my game? What has Sierra said about this?I don't know if Sierra has stated their position on these games but some people have decided that the copyrighted material is old enough for Sierra to not care. You might want to risk borrowing resources from other Sierra games, and they might not mind in the end, but the fact is that Sierra is still releasing their very old games in collections and there's other third parties cracking down on piracy.
Anyway, it's not all gloom. Make your own graphics, bundle the interpreter separately (or use one of the free ones), and make sure you modify anything you borrow so it could be covered under fair use.
I want to contribute to the AGI community but I don't want to make a game. What can I do?There are some things you could do:
Music editor - We need one. Perferably one written for AGI Studio, but a stand-alone utility would be great too.
Cached websites - Unfortunately, the AGI community's history is disappearing. Old sites, that haven't been updated for months are being deleted and messageboards are getting hacked into and erased. If you could download all the pictures and html from an old website from the Internet Wayback machine and zip it up, it would be great. We need to preserve our history.
http://www.archive.org/ Help other people - Simple, if you know something about AGI, try giving help to other people on the messageboards.
How do I contribute to the FAQ?Post a reply to this FAQ in the messageboard. The current moderator will add it to the FAQ, add credits and then remove the original post. That's the easiest way I could think of.
Whenever I post a URL, the messageboard stuffs it up and adds other text to the end of the link.Try adding a few spaces at the end of the URL to prevent the messageboard code from making a mistake.
