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AGI under Windows XP

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AGI under Windows XP

If you've been having trouble running AGI games, loading certain versions of AGI Studio, or trying to run some of the patches for AGI, this page might be helpful. While Windows XP is (apparently) amazing, it still has trouble with some older-style games which make some assumptions about the hardware or are just trying to be tricky.

There's not much information at the moment, but I should be able to update it as more comes to my attention.

AGI Studio Problems

If you are having troubles trying to run AGI Studio, load games or just get strange error messages.. make sure you have the latest version. Peter Kelly released the original version of AGI Studio and it worked fine for the earlier editions of Windows. Unfortunately, Peter is no longer updating it so he was not able to patch it to run under Windows XP.

Fortunately for everybody, he released the source code. Nailhead, proficient in Delphi, is now the current developer of AGI Studio.

What does this all mean? If you got AGI Studio from Peter Kelly's site, it is old and not supported anymore. The latest and greatest version can be found on agidev or at Nailhead's AGI Studio site. This new version has many new features and supports Windows XP

Running AGI Games

There are a few scenarios that you could encounter:

Unoriginal Unpatched AGI...
Try AGIL, NAGI or Sarien. These are clones of the interpreter but access the hardware through the "standard" Windows channels so there should be less troubles. NAGI has the best compatibility at the moment but AGIL and Sarien support more operating systems.

Patched AGI...
Some games made by fans use patched interpreters to add Sound Blaster support or different palettes.

You can try downloading an original interpreter to see if that works.
VDMSound emulates several soundcards for Windows NT/2000/XP to allow older games to still think it's accessing the sound hardware.
SoundFX is a commercial alternative to VDMSound if you still have no luck.
Abandonloader is another loader for old games. It supports VDMSound and also lets you slow down games.

Still having problems?
The last thing I can suggest is to emulate a complete PC and run the game from there:

DOSBox emulates an older style PC in the Windows environment
MESS also emulates older style PCs as well as hundreds of other systems but needs ROMs to properly work.
Tand-Em emulates a pcjr or Tandy system but needs to boot from a bootdisk.
Bochs is another open source PC emulator.

I have not got access to Windows XP so I can't say if they will work for you. However, I have heard that it's worked for other people and I would love to hear of any other successes.

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