I am trying to play Kings Quest 6. I have never at any time had a problem getting the program to run on Windows XP, even before the emulators and patches. My high colors and high resolution have not caused a problem either.
I should say right now that although I used to have the KQ6 CD when I was a child, the copy(s) I have now are... not from a CD. All files (?) from the CD have been copied into the ZIP folder that magically appeared on my desktop one day, so I don't know if technically all of the files are there. There is no folder hierarchy: all files are in the base folder, C:\Kings Quest 6\
There are two problems I am having:
1.) [minor problem] The cursors and buttons are uglier than I remember them. The buttons that appear at the beginning of the game: Restore, Play, etc., as well as the Walk, Look, Touch, etc. buttons, are ugly and light orange-ish whereas they used to be brown when I was younger. If not brown, then tan.. I don't know. The cursors are also unpleasant, and I assume this is because the system thinks I don't support the appropriate colors or something.
2.) [major problem] THE VOICES DO NOT WORK. The background music works just fine, but the voices do not work. I get the dialogs with words, and the less pleasant looking pictures of people while they're talking... not the detailed ones one gets with the voice option on. Oh, and in the settings Voice/Closed Captioning is not an option anywhere. I remember I used to have the option of choosing one when I was young, but it's not here.
Yes, I ran the SETUP.EXE and specified the appropriate devices. Blaster is supposed to work for my Vocal Audio, so I choose it. IT HAS A CHECK NEXT TO IT.
Used to, as soon as I opened the game (I directly open SIERRA.EXE, there's no alternative batch file) I would get the "Cannot Initialize Audio Hardware" or thereabout error message. This stopped when I used GoSiERRA patch that fixes the Blaster driver file, but no change in the gameplay whatsoever.
Next, I downloaded DOSbox 0.65 and opened KQ6 with it. It opens file, but no change in game play. I didn't configure DOSbox or anything because I didn't know what settings to use. I read about sound problems being because of a speed problem with legacy software, so I set the cycles down to 1000, 400, etc. in DOSbox before running KQ6 and no differences besides it being slow. Next, I downloaded VDMSound. I right click, run with VDMS, it opens, etc etc. Again, no differences.
Okay, now I know voices run off the CD from the RESOURCE.AUD which is in my C:\Kings Quest 6\
I reconfigured RESOURCE.CFG to reflect my C:\Kings Quest 6\ in the appropriate places, and I wouldn't think having a space in the file name would matter.
I downloaded the SIERRA.INI file from the Internet, which I configured again to match my base directory. I know you need SCIWV.EXE for some reason to use the SIERRA.INI.. or so a website hinted at. I have that file, but when I run it it says in two separate error messages: Cannot find SCIDLL.DLL, and Cannot find RAVE.DLL
I have neither of those files. Again, EVERY KQ6 FILE IS IN THE SAME FOLDER. There are no subfolders.
I have all of the SCR, HEP, SYN, etc. files in my base folder too. I know they're assumed to remain on the CD.
I've tried two different computers, one oldish, one new (Dell), so I doubt it's the specs. Exact same problems for both. I've tried multiple versions of the.. ahem, game from ZIP files from miscellenous sources. Always the same problem.
Does anyone have any idea of what to do here? I don't know how to get it to read my audio files from my computer.
|