Running AGI Games

To run an AGI game on your system, you will need the game-specific files and an interpreter. The game-specific files are distributed by the author and are system independent. Games often come bundled with an interpreter. However -- barring some exceptions -- you will be perfectly able to run them with the interpreter of your choice.

Choosing the right interpreter

The most popular choice for playing AGI games is using the NAGI interpreter. Here is a table showing available interpreters and their compatible system.

	DOS	Windows	Mac OS	Linux	BSD	Pocket PC	Game Boy Advance	Series 60 Mobile Phone
Sierra's original interpreter	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
Sarien	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
AGIL	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
NAGI	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
ScummVM	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Other/Emulator	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

1. Sarien has been quite inactive in years. Luckily it has been merged with ScummVM as it's AGI engine and now they are improving it, so it's a lot recommended to use ScummVM instead in the near future when the AGI engine appears on a stable build (or unstable if you want to try and not worry of finding some bugs and want to help on the betatesting).

Quick guides

Interpreters

Running an AGI game with Sierra's original interpreter

To use Sierra's original DOS interpreter, you will need the following files:

Game Specific Files	Interpreter Files
VOL.??? LOGDIR. PICDIR. VIEWDIR. SNDDIR. WORDS.TOK OBJECT. (See Game Specific Files for more info.)	AGI AGIDATA.OVL CGA_GRAF.OVL EGA_GRAF.OVL HGC_FONT HGC_GRAF.OVL HGC_OBJS.OVL IBM_OBJS.OVL JR_GRAF.OVL SIERRA.COM VG_GRAF.OVL

To play your game, copy the Game Specific Files into an empty directory, then simply copy the Interpreter files into the same directory. Then execute the SIERRA.COM file from either typing it at the DOS prompt or Double-Clicking it in Windows.

Running an AGI game with NAGI

Windows Create a folder under your NAGI directory for the game to go in Example:             C:\NAGI\Yourgame Copy the Game Specific Files into that folder you created. Run the game by executing N.EXE

Linux Before we start, please install the development sdl libraries. Now to get NAGI working in linux you are going to need the source code of NAGI which you can get from the AGI Development Site. Extact the tar.gz file to your hard drive. Now open up a terminal and browse to the src directory of the files you extracted. Now type: make -f Makefile.linux If all went well if you go to the bin directory you should see a file called "nagi". Copy all the files from the nagi directory into your games directory and run it. Note: I havn't gotten sound in nagi to work properly yet in linux... I will have to play around with it later to see if I can get it to work.

Running an AGI game with Sarien

Windows INSERT TEXT HERE

Dos INSERT TEXT HERE

Linux Before we start make sure you have the x11 libraries installed. As of this writing you have 2 options when compiling sarien. The latest cvs snapshots, and 0.7.0 source code. I myself prefer the cvs snapshots because it has tons of bug fixes and new features that arn't in 0.7.0. Either way you need to download the appropriate source code that you want to compile. Extract the tar.gz file that contains sarien's source code to your hard drive. Then open up a terminal and browse the the directory you extracted sarien into. Now type this into the terminal: ./configure This should setup the configuration so that it works best with your system and setup. If by any chance the later steps fail, you can send the sarien team the Rules file that is created so they can figure out why it doesn't work on your system. Next type in: make Now you should head into the etc directory of the sarien extraction and rename sarien.cfg to sarien.conf. Then copy the file to the /etc/ directory of your linux system. Next go into the bin directory of your sarien extraction and copy the "sarien" file into the directory your AGI game is in and run it to play the game.

Running an AGI game with AGIL

Windows Get AGIL from the AGI Development Site. Unzip all files to the game folder (i.e. the folder containing the game-specific files). Double-click agil.exe to run the game. Pressing F11 toggles between full-screen mode and windowed mode.

Dos INSERT TEXT HERE

Linux First thing you need to do is get a copy of the AGIL archive. You can get one at the AGI Development Site. Now extract the archive from the tar.gz file to your hard drive. Then create a bin directory in the directory that you extracted it to. For some reason the archive doesn't include or extract the bin directory so you have to create it yourself. Next thing you have to do is compile AGIL. To do so on you are going to need gcc installed on the system. Compiling it depends on what graphic driver you want to use. x11 or svga. In most cases your going to want x11 since svga doesn't work on most systems. Please make sure you have the libx11 and libx11-dev packages installed, otherwise the compile will not work. Now open up a terminal and make your way to the directory you extracted the AGIL archive to. Then type this: make x11 If all went well you should now have a file in the bin directory called "agil". Now copy that file into the same directory of an AGI game and then run it to play the game. If you run it and nothing happens when it starts up and it either freezes or doesn't open a window. Chances are your sound drivers are block agil from running. To get around this type this into a terminal: killall esd Now that you have done that try running AGIL and this time it should work. But please note that we had to kill the sound server. So other sounds most likely won't work now until you restart your system. I don't know if these next 3 steps work outside of Ubuntu or not, but you can do this to restart the sound server without restarting. First type: sudo /etc/init.d/alsa stop Now type: esd & And last type: /etc/init.d/alsa start That will restart the sound server. But as I mentioned before I don't know if those 3 commands works in linux distro's other than Ubuntu or not.

Exceptions

Some games require a certain interpreter to run properly or at all.

See Also

• AGI
• Hacked AGI Interpreters
• AGILE
• NAGI
• Sarien
• GBAGI
• AGIL
• MEKA
• Java AGI
• LAGII
• JAGI