Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter VGA
 

Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review

I can't get this file to work. It gets as far as roger wilco falling out of the closet, and the program experiences a fatal error right after the maintenance droid that's flying by reaches the same area. Poof it just stios itself & goes back to windows. Am I doing something wrong? I got the L.L.L.1VGA & the KQ1VGA to work fine.

Sorry, wasn't registered before :whistle: , but my problem with SQ1VGA still stands! :help:

hey, i had the same prob too. it's all tied up with the sound drivers. try running the set up (install.exe) and only select the pc speaker. then you can run the game and get a little bit past where it stuffs up, save, then quit and enable the sound drivers again. that worked for me!

Have you tried dosbox yet? That solved most probs at first. Now for some odd reason they want to say they're not installed ,and nothing I do fixes it. Ug, I hate this crap.

Sarah - I had to fiddle with my audio to even get as far as the opening screen! I didn't try "PC Speaker" though... I'll give that a try & repost.

WildZeppelin - I've never heard of "Dosbox", is that a download on this site? I'll look for it on the net and give it a try.

:eeeeeh:

DosBox is an emulator of x86 machines. It emulates everything from CPU up to the soundcard. Great way of making oldie DOS games run on modern PC's.

I strongly recommend you to get it and try.

Yeah I noticed this game was a bit more picky about sound issues than the other sierra games. Running Dosbox, my game would hang near the very start of the game (after intro) where the robot zooms by and you hear the ship's computer voice talk about the self destruct sequence. I can still exist the game, but the game itself seems to be permantly waiting.

Anyway I solved it by making dosbox emulate the older soundblaster pro card rather than the default soundblaster 16 card (which is the better more advanced card but for whatever reason, this game has issues with it).

I also had to run the install program from the space quest directory and set soundcard to soundblaster rather than the default roland option. WHich is sad because I use have the roland with soundblaster combo in my old 386pc machine and that rocked. The superior Roland midi music, which Sierra took advantage of, sounded great.

So basically the steps you've got to do:
1) in dosbox, have dosbox write out a conf file using the -writeconf to/my/path/dosbox.conf option, like
-writeconf c:\oldgames\dosbox.conf

See this link to read about it in detail.
dosbox faq on config

2) edit the dosbox.conf file you've created (or whatever you called it) in your text editor. Look for the "[sblaster]" section and change "type=sb16" to "type=sbpro1"
Save your conf file

Read this (dosbox configuration files) and this (soundblaster section) for more info about conf (configuration files).

3) start dosbox (or restart if you had it running) with your conf file by using the -conf to\my\path option, like:
dosbox -conf c:\oldgames\dosbox.conf

4) finally if you haven't already, navigate to your space quest 1 vga directory and run the install program, by typing "install" and then change the soundcard setting to soundblaster and save your changes and exit the program

5) run space quest. BTW, there seems to be a missing bat file in the zip download for this game on this site, so you'll have to run space quest by executing the "SCIDHUV.EXE" executable by typing in "SCIDHUV" at the command prompt instead of "sierra" or "sq1" like you'd normally expect. You can make your own bat file if you want since they are just simply text files, but I won't go into that here.

This worked with me and I didn't have to alter or mess with different soundblaster drivers (those *.drv files).

It was not that complicated for me....

To Run Space Quest 1 - VGA

Open INSTALL.EXE in DosBox
1) Select Graphics, and re-select 256 colours
2) Select Sound and choose IBM PC or Soundblaster
3) Accept these choices and Save congifuration

Open SCIDHUV.EXE in DosBox
Note: The screen will be black for a few seconds before the Sierra logo appears. From here see what the sound is like, try both sound options to see what sounds the best.

Happy gaming.... :D

Links:
Download DosBox
Easy Guide to using DosBox

Works fine with VDMS + VDMS Launchpad as well.
all you have to do is right click on install.exe, run with vdms, default configuration and setup the sound (use roland mt-32, mt-100 etc with default vdms config) with it etc using that and then do the same for scidhuv.exe to play it :)