Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!midway!mimsy!haven!ncifcrf!lhc!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: A2R&D vs. Apple
Message-ID: <15913@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 20 Apr 91 20:42:21 GMT
References: <9104181818.AA20737@apple.com> <1991Apr18.201701.18584@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <109636@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <109636@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> meekins@tortoise.cis.ohio-state.edu (timothy lee meekins) writes:
>Hmmm. Sort of like how the IIgs version of King's Quest IV gives the
>ALT key commands. Gee, and Sierra says the IIgs is too slow to run their
>games. This ALT screw-up makes it almost obvious that they had some
>IBM hacker write the GS version. No wonder it didn't run very fast. 

Come one, we've discussed this before.  King's Quest IV (IIGS version)
is based on Sierra's AGI system, not the SCI system that King's Quest V
uses.  Sierra once tried an SCI implementation for the IIGS but decided
that customers would not find the quality acceptable, unless they had
more than a 2.5MHz effective CPU clock rate and more than 256KB of RAM,
neither requirement met by Apple's stock IIGS product at the time.

There are reasons why the IIGS SCI implementation was so slow, but not
because of "IBM hacker writing the GS version".  Even the IBM version
is written primarily in SCI and C.  Sierra long ago made, correctly in
my opinion, the decision to develop their interactive graphic adventures
in a machine-neutral programming language (currently, SCI) which would
be compiled and/or interpreted by machine-specific SCI interpreters.
Note that this is the same general method used in the old Infocom text
adventures, which were coded in ZIL, with a ZIL interpreter provided for
each distinct machine platform.