King's Quest Compilation MIDI Fix

[veggieranger]

Hey, I posted the following in the Sierra.com forum but thought that AdventureGamer folk would find this information useful as well. Collector on the Sierra.com forum noted that All you have to do is open the RESOURCE.CFG file in Notepad and set soundDrv = GENMIDI.DRV. I'd see if that works for you before going ahead with my instructions.

Hey! I just got my King's Quest Compilation today and was very sad to discover that King's Quest 6 used some crappy synth emulation thing that was...beyond sucky. However! I have come up with a solution to make it use your computers MUCH higher quality MIDI synth.

Step 1: Make sure you have your ORIGINAL King's Quest 6 CD or OLD Compilation disc
Step 2: Copy the following files to "C:\Program Files\Sierra\King's Quest Collection(TM)\kq6" The files are: Install.ex$, Install.exe, Install.hlp, Install.ini, Install.ins, Install.lgo, Install.scr, and Install.txt.
Step 3: Open Install.exe, press enter, go to Music, select General MIDI Sound Driver, press "Accept these choices and save configuration"

And now when you start King's Quest 6 your computer will use your computer's midi synth which is of MUCH higher quality than what it defaults to.

I imagine this solution works the same for King's Quest 5, but since most of it is prerecorded I doubt you'll hear much of a difference.

Hope this helps somebody! Note I did this from memory so if it doesn't work the most likely culprit is I forgot to tell you to drag a file from the CD to the hard drive, please reply if you get an error in the installer and I'll double check to make sure I didn't forget anything.

-Max

PS: I'd be happy to post a .ZIP of all the required files, but I'll want permission from a Sierra moderator to do so.

[fov]

Thanks for the info! I'm sure that'll come in handy for someone. (I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with some of the other compilations in addition to King's Quest, too.)

I remember having to run KQ6 with VDMSound so the music would sound normal (otherwise there were instruments overlapping each other and everything just sounded out of sync). Do these problems exist at all in the compilation version, or does the DosBox environment take care of that?

[littleguybrush]

Does the introduction of kq6 in the new compilation runs smooth?
It's the only problem I have when playing king quest in dosbox.
(music sounds fine here)

[veggieranger]

As "Collector" on Sierra's forums notes, my solution is not the easiest as apparently all you need to do do is open the RESOURCE.CFG file in Notepad and set
soundDrv = GENMIDI.DRV. Oh well.

FOV: On my computer, sound, graphics, MIDI, really run flawlessly at the moment, really happy about it. I know the instrument overlapping thing you're referencing to, I've encountered it when trying to get a lot of Sierra games to work, this problem luckily does not occur in the compilation KQ6.

The introduction is the DOS intro, not the .AVI file that plays in the Windows version. It's very choppy and I think that's just how its going to stay. Sierra was nice enough though to include the less choppy (but still only 7fps...) AVI intro at C:\Program Files\Sierra\King's Quest Collection(TM)\kq6\ along with 3 other videos from the original game. MAKINGKQ.AVI is the Making Of short that's kind of interesting, TOON.AVI is the Windows opening sequence, HDLogo is the Windows Sierra Opening.

You can also copy your original KQ5 installer and related files to the compilation's KQ5 folder, but your options don't include General MIDI (not invented yet?) Since most of the music is prerecorded anyway I wouldn't bother.

I tried hacking the installer to include the general midi driver from KQ6 as an experiment, it took and I got it installed but it wasn't compatible.