King's Quest IV SCI MS-DOS MT-32 Playthrough
6This is a playthrough of King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. KQ4 is the first IBM PC-compatible game to support sound cards, and I am using its ideal sound card option, the Roland MT-32 configured in DOSBox as a rev. 0 unit. The version played here is one of the two "early versions" of the game, 1.000.111, which was released only a few days after 1.000.106.
KQ4 changed significantly in its graphics from the early versions to its later versions, the last of which was included in all the the King's Quest compilations. I am playing an early version to show the game looked like when it was first released. In the later versions, in order to save a disk Sierra relied heavily on dithering, removed certain objects and only recolored the sky for the night time outdoor screens. In the early versions, Sierra essentially drew different day and night screens.
KQ4 is the first Sierra game to optionally support mice, which come in handy for tricky movements as I show in the video. I died several times while playing this game and edited most of those deaths out. I left a few in to show how lethal this game can be. I used a cycle setting of 2000 cycles, which would have been a pretty high-end machine at the time of KQ4's release in 1988 but there will be occasional music slowdowns as a result.