King's Quest: Quest for the Crown
This game is the first in the fantastic King's Quest series released by Sierra.
Story:
The king is dying without an heir, so he sends Sir Graham out on a quest to recover three magical items from the realm. If Sir Graham is able to recover all three items, he will be granted the crown as the next king of Daventry. Graham must search high and low, using his wits to solve problems and recover the three magical items (A chest of never-ending gold, A mirror that shows the future, and A shield that guarantees safety and victory in battle).
General Info
- Goal: Aims for fastest time
- Emulator used: c-square's modified JPC-rr 11.2 with mouse and improved typing support
- Game Version: 2.0F
Run Info
Text Entry The game doesn't display typed text every frame. However, multiple keystrokes can be buffered into emulator memory on a single frame and will all be displayed when the game polls for this input. This rarely hinders progress as text input can usually be accomplished during periods of movement unlike SCI interpreter games like Quest for Glory or Space Quest 3 where the text input box will pause movements.
Desyncs JPC-rr is horrible for being able to splice in changes after the fact. Making a change causes many desyncs down the line. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure every screen is fully optimized before moving on to the next.
Other notes on the run
- This game has RNG that affects two scenes of the run.
- The bird has a 50% chance of showing up on the screen.
Thankfully no manipulation was necessary for this run. - In the cave staircase (coming down from the clouds), a dwarf has a chance of showing up and stealing your treasures. Again, no manipulation was needed to avoid the elf for this run.
- The bird has a 50% chance of showing up on the screen.
- As this TAS foregoes multiple point gathering opportunities, it's definitely not a 100% run.
- I'm hoping we can get at least one run of each official game in the KQ series published on the site at some point.
Potential Improvements
- Moving at the 'Fastest' pace is extremely difficult, and hard to end up where you want to go. There may be better movement patterns which I have not found.
From a pure speed perspective, about 2 seconds could be saved by turning off the sound effects during the scene where the castle door opens. This would eliminates the wait currently present for the SFX. As the game is already mostly silent--with only the occasional beeps/boops for SFX--I elected to leave this sound in the run.- Note to the judge: If it is preferred that I eliminate this SFX for a faster run, it wouldn't be too difficult to do this and resync remaining inputs as the event is near the end of the game.
Suggested screenshot:
Any of the screens with Graham climbing the beanstalk. This is an extremely difficult task in RTA runs.
Files
HDD TRACKS 16 - SIDES 16 - SECTORS 63
| Timestamp | MD5 | Size | Filename |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19900101000000 | 4771062c7f64bf64c185178613fd665a | 39424 | AGI |
| 19900101000000 | d83459a8643dfc67b4629ec4afe64e13 | 8192 | AGIDATA.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | e34849e963efdcc942b67ee9bf5c1533 | 1024 | CGA_GRAF.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | 714c88fa15b8327c585b86f3e619b068 | 1024 | EGA_GRAF.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | f3d4c66e195491aa759b7c5ef996488b | 3072 | HGC_FONT |
| 19900101000000 | 8eb68e541e8ea93da96c7fc4cfde7f3f | 1536 | HGC_GRAF.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | a8f5aabf72ed3d4165038275faf8b527 | 1024 | HGC_OBJS.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | 119949f12a5fc14a082794350c19118b | 512 | IBM_OBJS.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | 4488067df5a7201e34ee3b01252e9860 | 512 | JR_GRAF.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | f579e8fb39209a321d575ebdc5f79014 | 3121 | KQ1.COM |
| 19900101000000 | 10ad66e2ecbd66951534a50aedcd0128 | 315 | LOGDIR |
| 19900101000000 | 6eca02fa540337308529ff13e9e764aa | 331 | OBJECT |
| 19900101000000 | d468936618bed024ea453a315aba1958 | 255 | PICDIR |
| 19900101000000 | cf37ab2f6af09afee3598b92c9a42983 | 144 | SNDDIR |
| 19900101000000 | df5f5263d61e250495c249002c6210a1 | 512 | VG_GRAF.OVL |
| 19900101000000 | ac7048eceb628c07f452ecd1662d7b3d | 432 | VIEWDIR |
| 19900101000000 | 8ec91effac02ba476f823f065ca10172 | 48472 | VOL.0 |
| 19900101000000 | 77c3be070fc9bf9c69952ed56821efe1 | 200630 | VOL.1 |
| 19900101000000 | b33d0a9938c095da1a69b5ee3c9209d4 | 90891 | VOL.2 |
| 19900101000000 | 50e00d15fa3e25b512c19608119111cf | 3144 | WORDS.TOK |
EDIT:
I realized that typing "fast" to change the game-speed is actually faster than using the menu. Unfortunately this happens at the very beginning of the run. This required a complete redo of the run.
Here is a link to the new movie file. Someone with the power, please update the submission.
Notes on the new run:
I decided to go ahead and cut the sound from the castle door opening sequence to save the time. It is restored immediately after entering the castle.
The only other major (which are actually fairly minor) differences are as follows:
- An extra screen transition was needed to alter RNG and spawn the bird.
- Slight movment variations occurred throughout the run due to the change in how speed was altered and way the game processes movement.
- The position of the Giant's nap changed.
The above encodes are of the new movie file.
fsvgm777: Replaced movie file with an improvement of 166 frames.
feos: Accepting to Moons.
fsvgm777: Processing.