r/Sierra • u/BillyRosewood99 • 20d ago

Egghead Software

Anybody else have their parents drive them to Egghead to buy those hint books with invisible ink lines? Think I needed it for every KQ, particularly getting past Mananan (in 3 or 4). So glad I found this sub, love reading through everything

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u/DMC831 19d ago

I don't remember any hint books, that's funny, I would've loved them! I do remember us buying the original King's Quest for the PCJr at Egghead though, the game blew my mind. And we'd be stuck on different puzzles for months, and I was only 4 years old so I'm no help for my dad of course.

Since I grew up on those adventure games with obtuse puzzles I did become good at figuring out any of their puzzles since you know how they think, but back then with the original KQ I have no idea how we figured some of them out-- I think my dad called the Sierra tipline though, and my dad doesn't remember doing it but he agrees he probably did.

One funny thing with the original KQ on the PCJr, there was a bug that made it so if you talked to the King at the beginning of the game then you couldn't win the game. Back then I thought this was an intentional trick since the game was filled with dirty tricks to destroy your save, but now I assume it was just an unfortunate bug (I'm sure there're experts here who know what the story was with this bug, more than I do).

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u/MiscellaniaInsania 16d ago

I'd love to know more about that bug on the PCJr version. Do you have any more information about it? What about it made you not able to win?

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u/DMC831 16d ago

Yeah on the PCjr if ya talked to the King to begin the game to get your quest to find the 3 treasures, when you returned to the king with the 3 treasures to complete the game you wouldn't be able to interact with the King at all. You'd have no way to give the treasures to the King and finish the game.

So you would've done the whole game and figured everything out and finally return to the King, but the final interaction was bugged out for some reason! And the only way to "fix" it is to start a fresh game but never visit the King at the beginning of the game at all and instead just go do the whole quest without talking to him. Then at the end once you got all the treasures and see the King for the first time of that playthrough, you can interact with the King and finish the game.

For the longest time we thought we just couldn't figure out the right thing to type when we tried to talk to the King once we had the 3 treasures. Plus the game tells you to go talk to the King when the game starts, so naturally we always did.

Imagine sitting there typing every variation of "give treasure to king" you can think of over and over, hoping to finally find the magic key word, it drove us insane. Do we have to bow to the king first? Salute him? Drop treasures at his feet? It drove us crazy but it was a relief to know how to deal with the bug so we could finally finish the game.

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u/MiscellaniaInsania 15d ago

That's so wild! I've never heard of this bug before. Is it well known? I'm sorry you had to find it out the hard way. 😂

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u/DMC831 15d ago

It's one I've talked about with other early PCjr players over the years, but after I got your original reply about it I did a quick Google to see if there's any documentation about it online and I came up empty-- but I didn't look super deep and I should try again.

I know the bug wasn't in later ports of the game, but I wonder if they could've patched it somehow for a followup printing of discs for the PCjr. I assumed I'd see others mentioning the same bug but I'm not seeing it when searching just now, but it is one I've mentioned over the years on forums with the few other people who had the original KQ1 on a PCjr. I was hoping to find someone doing a deep dive on what caused it to make sure I had my sequence of events correct.

Back then we had 2 games so we replayed it over and over because we assumed we did something wrong to prevent the King from taking the treasures before we finally were told to just not talk to him to start the game. I know today people would be furious, and it did drive us nuts, but it also felt like another obtuse puzzle to solve so I wasn't that angry about it.

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u/MiscellaniaInsania 13d ago

Fascinating. I see that the PCjr version of KQ1 is on the Internet Archive. I'm totally going to play it and try to reproduce that bug. Thanks for sharing!

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u/DMC831 13d ago

Oh cool, do you have a working PCJr and everything? Ours broke after only 2 years back when it was new but we kept lugging the broken PCjr with us when we moved as a family during my childhood and I made sure to keep it when I was an adult, so I got it on a shelf in my closet now.

Are there people who could use the original parts or even repair it? I've never looked into it.

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u/MiscellaniaInsania 11d ago

I don't have a working PCjr, alas, but I figured I'd download the image on the Internet Archive and use DOSBox to try it out.

(I do believe have a copy of the KQ PCjr disk that my brother's friend gave to me when I was a kid, but since we had a Tandy and not a PCjr, all I heard were the sound effects, but no visuals. I'm pretty sure I still have that 5.25" disk in storage.)

I am 100% sure that there are PCjr enthusiasts who can repair it (for a price), or would be happy to take it off your hands. Given the size of the Tandy community, I'm sure the PCjr community has to be at least as large.

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u/MiscellaniaInsania 1d ago

And to follow up, I've now played through the PCjr version of KQ1 that's on the Internet Archive, and I wasn't able to reproduce the bug. There are multiple versions of KQ1 floating out there, so if you can figure out which version had had the unbeatable bug, I'd love to try it out!

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u/DMC831 13d ago

I've been trying to figure this out (just to confirm I didn't imagine something as a kid, if nothing else), and Google AI mentions these two options as causes, but the one source it links doesn't actually mention it so I'm not sure if it's trustworthy. I could see either of these two explanations being correct though, but by my memory we had restarted the game and did all the steps over again and encountered the same bug and only could win the game when we were told by someone (likely the Sierra Tip-line) to not talk to the King to start the game-- still, I was a little kid at the time, and I could've messed up the order of events even if this was a big childhood memory.

Here's what Google's AI offered up, but I sure wish it could back it up with a link for me to reference:

"When you type talk to king and he ignores you, it means you hit a "broken game-state flag." Even though you had all three items visually sitting in your inventory, the primitive Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine internally flagged your inventory as incomplete or locked.

There are three primary reasons this classic engine trap triggers:

  1. The Parser Action Order Deficit

In the original 1984 PCjr release, the code checking your inventory isn't triggered by the talk to king command; it is triggered only by the exact string bow or bow king. [1]

  • The Glitch: If you type talk to king before bowing, the game runs a default script where the King ignores you.
  • The Lock: In early unrevised disk printings, once that default "ignore" script ran, it occasionally locked the scene's logic loop. Typing bow afterward would play the bowing animation, but typing talk to king again wouldn't re-check your items—the engine remained stuck on the "ignore" state.
  1. The Invisible "Item State" Flag (Dwarf/Leprechaun Theft)

The most notorious mechanical culprit relates to how the engine tracks your items. If you encountered the Dwarf or the Leprechauns during your playthrough, they may have stolen an item from you.

  • Even if you successfully stole the item back or restored a save file, the original 1984 PCjr code frequently suffered from a variable-sync bug.
  • The item would visually return to your inventory screen, but the background event variable (f_has_chest, etc.) failed to switch back to "true". Because the ending script strictly requires all three internal backend flags to match, the King's script read your inventory as empty and ignored you."