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I remember sending in my money for the CD magazine too. I always enjoyed the magazine and was disappointed when they didn’t do it. I kept all my old magazines for years, and unfortunately threw them out a couple years ago. Now I wish I had kept them.
For my old games, I just use two old computers that I had bought when new. One is an IBM 386SX with just a 3.5 floppy and a 40 meg HD. The other is a gateway P66. It has a cd drive, a floppy, a SB16, a diamond viper video card and a 500 meg HD
KQ7 problem:
To do this:
1) Copy the File SIERRAW.EXE from the King’s Quest 7 CD to the game’s directory on your hard drive (usually C:\SIERRA\KQ7).2) Highlight the icon for King’s Quest 7. Press ALT+Enter on the keyboard to bring up the FILE PROPERTIES box. Go into the Command Line box. Move over in the box until you find SIERRAWS.EXE. Delete the S following the W, so it becomes SIERRAW.EXE. Do not change or adjust anything else. Click on the OK button. You should see your King’s Quest icon change if you did everything correctly.
C:\SIERRA\KQ7\SIERRAW.EXE c:\SIERRA\KQ7\RESOURCE.WINNote that this may slow gameplay a little, but you should not experience the problem any longer.
Hope this helps someone else as well….
The Win version of King’s Quest 6 takes the most to get going on XP. You’ll need to have VDMSound and the VDMS Launchpad installed on your system to do it, but you will need it to play the older KQ games with audio, anyway.
1) Go to http://ntvdm.cjb.net/ , download VDMSound and the VDMS Launchpad and install both.
2) Go to the KQ6 shortcut in your stary menu and right click on it and choose “Properties”. Copy what is in the “Target:” box and paste it in Notepad. Save it in the games folder as KQ6.bat.
3) Copy the file “RESOURCE.AUD” from the CD to the installed game folder on your hard drive.
4) Open your game’s installed folder on your hard drive and delete the file “HDLOGO.AVI” and open the file “SIERRA.INI” (it may be in a sub-folder named “WIN”) in Notepad. Look for the lines:
audpath=D:\
audio=D:\
movieplayer=1
(Note, yours may be different, depending on what letter drive your CD-ROM is.) Chang this to:
audpath=.\
audio=.\
movieplayer=0
5) Right click on the file in the installed folder, “SCIWV.EXE” and go to the Compatibility tab and choose Compatibility mode for Win 98 or Win 9, 256 colors. do the same for the file you made earlier, “KQ6.bat”
6) Now all you have to do is right click on the .bat file you made and choose “♫ Run with VDMS” (the one with the musical notes) and the game should run.
You will find a new file in the installed folder — “KQ6.VLP” When you want to play the game after this, just double click on this file. You can copy this file to your desktop, your start menu or where ever you fid easy to get at to run the game.I have work arounds for all of these problems. Laptops are the most difficult however, since upgrades are limited to pcmcia, as well as type I and II support. So far I’ve had success with all of my laptop investments; my very old Compaq Armada, NEC Ready 220T, and my NEC Versa Sxi. I’ll be picking up a new Gateway 4530gz later in the week.
If there is enough support, I’ll seriously consider writing something up.
The idea is to be able to run DOS fully, no problems, on any modern machine.
Hi! I’ve ripped the Shivers soundtrack and converted them to mp3. I’ve rarred the soundtrack because of the number of small music files.
Hope you like it!
Grtz
Edit Bobby: I’m still having problems uploading stuff to Sierra Gamers but I managed to upload the Shivers Soundtrack. It’s not the most elegant upload (couldn’t do the attachments in 2 replies) but it works 😉
“It’s not necessary to build a separate computer to run all of your old applications. I’ve always been a DOS nut and try to get it working wherever I can. My laptop is currently setup to quad-boot MSDOS 7.1, win95c, win98se, and winXP.” (Brandon, the quote function does not seem to work in Firefox or IE for me)
It’s not that simple. At one time muti-boot was good solution, but increasingly it is becoming less so. There are many reasons to have older hardware. Many older games have speed bugs and slowdown utilities aren’t very good on a lot of new hardware, especially with the new dual core CPUs, which may before long be the only CPUs that you can get. Modern motherboards have no ISA slots, which rules out the use of some cards that you might want to use, such as some of the Roland sound cards.
Then there some of the earlier 3D games that used add in 3D cards that can only be paired with older PCI graphics cards. Mask of Eternity can’t be run at higher than 640×480 resolution on modern AGP cards (now being replaced by PCIe.) The only way around this with a “Glide Wrapper,” but these are imperfect and you will take a big performance hit using them.
If you don’t want to set up an old machine, emulation, such as with DOSBox, is a better route for most, and does not require you to find install disks for the older OSs, and if you are fortunate enough to have the install disks for Windows 3x, the next version of DOSBox will let you install it. you will be able to run the old 16 bit Windows games on XP that don’t work natively (think of the Windows version of KQ6) under XP and the new 64 bit Windows will not run any 16 bit code.
And lastly, you can no longer find DOS and Win9x drivers for a lot of the newer hardware, so you might be stuck with 640×480, 16 colors for your graphics card in Win9x, or have no audio.
I’d certainly find it interesting. I have no idea how to go about doing that, but I’d definitely be interested in finding out.
hi. i did what you said about King’s Quest 6 and everything worked except when i tried to run it with VDMS. it said CAN’T FIND INTERP.ERR. please help!!
It’s not necessary to build a separate computer to run all of your old applications. I’ve always been a DOS nut and try to get it working wherever I can. My laptop is currently setup to quad-boot MSDOS 7.1, win95c, win98se, and winXP.
~True DOS mode fully supports both midi and wav through SoundBlaster and mpu401 emulation, as well as cd-rom and full joystick support (even MS Sidewinder 3D). Max available conventional memory under the current emm386 settings is 658kb.
~win95c and 98se supports full directx acceleration, joystick support, and full midi and wave playback.
I’ve always had a desire to write a tutorial for this kind of customization online, but I’ve never taken the time to do it. Would any of you find this useful?
I am trying to get my Print Artist 4 to work on my Windows XP computer and get an error message saying I am missing a gdi.dll file. Suggestions? Thx.
You can try copying the disks to your hard drive. If any of the files have a CRC error, you won’t be able to copy them. Winimage is still made, infact, they just released a 64 bit version.
Does anyone know how to verify whether a floppy is still valid? I mean, if it doesn’t give an error, how much can we trust it?
There used to be a program called WINIMAGE that made disk images. I don’t know if that’s still made. I’d like to get all my floppy-based games backed up.
well, i know what variables are, and this was not my question
i wante to know, what parameters does the exe file accept?
Quote:
“… (by Gildor Inglorion) some bat files (eg. lsl5.bat) execute the scidhuv.exe followed by some variables/parameters, eg. scidhuv.exe %1 %2what parameters are acceptable for scidhuv and btw what’s the difference running the game from the .bat. instead of sierra.exe or scidhuv.exe? what are those %1 %2 for and what difference do they produce in execution?…”
“%1 %2” are just pseudo-parameters to re-direct parameters from the BAT file to the EXE program.
If you do not state any parameter when running the BAT, then the EXE won’t have any as well. If you state a “-v” parameter (just a dumb example) on the command line after LSL5, that will execute “SCIDHUV -v”. %1 is the first parameter of the BAT (if any), %2 is the second, %3 would be the third, etc. You can arrange them as you please in a BAT file, which can be very useful sometimes.In this case, it’s not very useful, and is strictly the equivalent of running SCIDHUV.EXE.
Vincent.
Quote:
“… (by Brandon Klassen) Also the person who is working on the imaging program is still working on it, I believe….”Yes, indeed. I’m currently hoping I can deliver more information and a working procedure by the end of the summer.
Vincent.
does anybody know where i can get a copy of the quest for glory 4 floppy version. i would really like to complete my qfg collection and that is the last one i need. i think anyway. am i wrong in thinking it’s not on the collection disk? that seems wierd to me.
This will be one of the archive projects happening here. We’ll be backing up each disk version of all of Sierra’s games, as far as we are able to. At first we’ll just be concerned with the files on the disks. A second version of the backup will be a pre-installed zip so that the original files are all present but there is no need to install the game. And the third version of the backup will be an actual image of the disk so that the disk can be exactly reproduced.
We haven’t talked about this a lot yet because as you can guess, there will be strict conditions to ensure we are getting untouched disks (many people will have used their disks for saved games, playing games off the disks so configuration files are saved, etc), but the project is under development. Also the person who is working on the imaging program is still working on it, I believe.
Ditto…One problem is the ever changing media format. Another is the installation that requires each disk to be inserted in the A drive. DosBox, which I know almost nothing about, may take care of the second problem.
If you had the source code on paper that would be nice. The only thing I can think of is to try to move it to a newer media like CD, DVD or Flash drive. This is easier said than done. Most new computers do not have 3 1/4 disk drives but they do have USB 2.0 for Flash / Thumb drives. The old computers do not have flash drives. I have pulled the hard drive out of the old computer and set it as a 2nd drive to my main hard drive. You have to know a little about drive installation. But if your old drive does not use the 40 pin setup it would be harder to do this. I have an old 486 with a 5 1/2 drive but the hard drive is “scuzy” and won’t install in my newer computer.
This all said, unless someone can can add more, were in the same boat. I have four cases of 5 1/2 disk with games of all types. It is hard for me to tell the difference between the many different types of 5 1/2 drives. (single sided, double density…)
Good Luck and let me know what you find out.
Hi,
I have the King’s Quest Collection Series on my Windows 98 computer. For some reason, my computer keeps restarting itself whenever I play King’s Quest 1 or 3 for a couple minutes. I didn’t have this problem when I played King’s Quest 2 or 5. (I haven’t tried the other ones yet.) And also, when I try to run King’s Quest 7, the message “Panic: Can’t find SIERRA.ERR” appears. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but that didn’t solve the problems. Any and all help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
Try
http://abandonware.the-frenchkiss.biz/
There is a lot of old games, including Phantasmagoria and Torin’s Passage for download, but of course it requires a fast Internet connection and… strong nerves! If anyone knows for a similar site, let me know.
