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Sierra’s setup/install program

Let’s summarize!

First of course we had this subdued thing. It doesn’t state its version number, and has no main menu – it just goes through all the different driver selections, then offers to copy the game to your hard drive. I got this from The Colonel’s Bequest. King’s Quest IV (1988) has the same, but with a different caption: “3D Adventure Game Setup/Installation Program”.

Unstated version, goes through a fixed script asking which driver you want and if you want to copy the game to your hard drive at the end, exactly like the original… but in color! Found this one in Space Quest IV (disk version).

Version 3.15b looks like the SQ4D version, but actually has a proper menu like those from later on. This one is from the Leisure Suit Larry 1 SCI remake.

Version 3.31 brings the finalized style. This copy is from the Space Quest I remake.

Version 3.569 is pretty much the same, but the copyright box is taller.

Version 3.681, again not much to write home about. The copyright has been amended. I got this from Space Quest III, which is chronologically confusing to me. Version 3.690, from Freddy Pharkas, bumps it up to 1991-94… but to add to the confusion, the diskette version of Freddy Pharkas is version 3.644, with a 1991-93 copyright. To round out the confusion, the SVGA version of Leisure Suit Larry 6 has installer version 3.670, copyright 1991-93 as well. What ever!

Rounding out the official installers we have King’s Quest 7′s installer, now called inst.exe, version 3.758.

And finally, because nobody asked for it…

…there’s my from-scratch rewrite. Functionally on par, this is still missing a few features such as viewing a readme file, making a boot disk, detecting if a given driver is supported to begin with (it only shows known drivers that it can find the DRV file for, like the B/W installers, but doesn’t do the “supported by your system” tick marks), only showing options in the main menu if there’s a choice – if you only have VGA320.DRV, it shouldn’t show “Graphics”. The minimal menu should only show “Mouse”, “Memory”, “Make boot disk”, “Accept”, and “Cancel”, and actually installing the game to HDD (at least, the same way Sierra’s does). But other than that, it’s basically a drop-in replacement.

That version number will reach 1.000 soon enough, mark my words.

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