Case study

Sarien: a portable reimplementation of Sierra's AGI interpreter

Sarien reimplements Sierra On-Line's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) in C so that AGI games such as Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest II and Mixed-Up Mother Goose run across many platforms. It executes the compiled Logic bytecode and handles AGI graphic, text and sound resources, including Amiga and Apple IIgs versions and AGDS games, and adds extras such as a debugger console, picture and dictionary viewers and three-channel PCM sound. The Hacker's Guide documents the interpreter's architecture, drivers, graphics and sound; the project later merged into ScummVM.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-09
Evidence class: ? Source unavailable or unreadable at review time

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Evidence

Checked: 2026-11-10

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Runs files of Sierra On-Line AGI games; ports cover MS-DOS, Win32, BeOS, QNX, several Unix flavours, AmigaOS, MacOS X and WinCE for PocketPC.
Limits: The project describes itself as under development with no production-quality packages; script errors stem from incomplete AGI specifications, and the sprite system built by trial and error corrupts the screen in a few situations.
License: GNU General Public License version 2, as listed on the project page.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{sarien-agi-interpreter-case,
  title = {{Sarien: a portable reimplementation of Sierra's AGI interpreter}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://sourceforge.net/projects/sarien/}},
  url = {https://sourceforge.net/projects/sarien/},
  urldate = {2026-11-09},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/sarien-agi-interpreter-case/}}
}

Plain text

Sarien: a portable reimplementation of Sierra's AGI interpreter. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sarien/ (accessed 2026-11-09). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/sarien-agi-interpreter-case/

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