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It warms my heart that to see this much excitement and community around arguably the most interesting adventure game of that era. CB was also the motivation fo

It warms my heart that to see this much excitement and community around arguably the most interesting adventure game of that era. CB was also the motivation for my first “hack”: The game’s CGA driver was built custom to produce black and white graphics. I was gleeful to discover that copying a CGA driver from another contemporary SCI game produced reasonable four-color rendering.

Steuard 3y ago
Ha! Cool! I wasn't the only one! But honestly, I eventually concluded that with the resolution available on my CGA monitor, the (slightly) higher-resolution black and white version was probably a better choice (and it gave the game a bit of a noir air).
- tpmx 3y ago
  I wish I would have had this special driver for the 16-color CGA mode (!) on the Amstrad PC1512 back then: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75497 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75497
  - twoodfin 3y ago
    What killed me is that I had an ATI Graphics Solution that could do Plantronics modes[1]. Even came with a demo disk showing off the glorious 16 colors. Took 30+ years but someone finally wrote a Sierra driver for it[2]! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus [2] https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75877 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75877
    - tpmx 3y ago
      We should probably both have gotten Amigas instead.
      - twoodfin 3y ago
        Then I couldn’t have split the 5.25” and 3.5” PC disks with my PS/2 owning schoolmate! (Yes, Mr. Look-at-me-with-VGA…)
ahefner 3y ago
I had a good hacking opportunity on this game as well - a chap named Ravi Iyengar made a General MIDI sound driver you could drop into these SCI0 games (apparently they all did MT-32, but none did General Midi, and the driver from the later engine games wouldn't work), but for Colonel's Bequest the game would hang at the end of the intro sequence due to some sort of callback telling the script code the music had finished playing, which I identified and provided a patch for. Funny thing to reminisce on an afternoon 20 years ago, hacking on a driver to upgrade the sound in a game that was already by then ~14 years old which I'd played as a kid. Funnier still that only six months back or so I replayed this game again, but not before patching my ScummVM with a custom palette that I thought suited the game a little better than the default garish EGA colors..

Steuard 3y ago

Ha! Cool! I wasn't the only one! But honestly, I eventually concluded that with the resolution available on my CGA monitor, the (slightly) higher-resolution black and white version was probably a better choice (and it gave the game a bit of a noir air).

tpmx 3y ago
I wish I would have had this special driver for the 16-color CGA mode (!) on the Amstrad PC1512 back then: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75497 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75497
- twoodfin 3y ago
  What killed me is that I had an ATI Graphics Solution that could do Plantronics modes[1]. Even came with a demo disk showing off the glorious 16 colors. Took 30+ years but someone finally wrote a Sierra driver for it[2]! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus [2] https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75877 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75877
  - tpmx 3y ago
    We should probably both have gotten Amigas instead.
    - twoodfin 3y ago
      Then I couldn’t have split the 5.25” and 3.5” PC disks with my PS/2 owning schoolmate! (Yes, Mr. Look-at-me-with-VGA…)

ahefner 3y ago

I had a good hacking opportunity on this game as well - a chap named Ravi Iyengar made a General MIDI sound driver you could drop into these SCI0 games (apparently they all did MT-32, but none did General Midi, and the driver from the later engine games wouldn't work), but for Colonel's Bequest the game would hang at the end of the intro sequence due to some sort of callback telling the script code the music had finished playing, which I identified and provided a patch for. Funny thing to reminisce on an afternoon 20 years ago, hacking on a driver to upgrade the sound in a game that was already by then ~14 years old which I'd played as a kid. Funnier still that only six months back or so I replayed this game again, but not before patching my ScummVM with a custom palette that I thought suited the game a little better than the default garish EGA colors..