King's Quest 7: Trouble running under Windows 2000

[Melle]

I suppose you're all getting tired of questions like this one, but I love this old classic and I really want to play it once more, so please bear with me

Well, I actually got KQ7 to run under Win2k, using all sorts of troubleshooting guides from the web, but unfortunately I couldn't find any help on how to fix the speed problem.

When I start the game up, I get the crown cursor and the start screen, but the music and animation are intolerably slow. It's like I'm running the game in extra slow motion. I don't even know if the actual gameplay is slowed down as well because I never got around the first cutscene with Valanice, I always aborted before because her voice acting sounds like Rammstein performing a ballad...

I suppose it's a memory problem since I also get a strange message when doing the memory test in the installation prog, telling me I don't have enough memory which is quite impossible.

I'm running Windows 2000 SP4 on a 1GHz Pentium with 129.520 KB RAM

Can anyone help me?
Thanks in advance!

[Ghost_Rider]

Hello Melle,

Have you tried DOSBox?  It works great for most Sierra games from the late 80's to mid 90's.  http://dosbox.sf.net


Also take a look through these two threads, you might find some answers in here (if you have not already looked at these)

http://queststudios.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1088

http://queststudios.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1007

[Melle]

Hi, thanks, but KQ7 won't work with DOSbox, neither the SIERRAWS.exe nor the SIERRAW.exe, I tried that out. The first one returns a message that it's a windowed executable, the latter that the program cannot be run in DOS mode.

I read the threads you linked before but they didn't solve the problem. But thank you, anyway!

[Ghost_Rider]

Strange, I figured it would install/run fine in DOSBox.  Here's a good site for technical information, I haven't looked through everything but you might find your answer here:

Technical document:

http://www.sierraplanet.com/kingsquest7/techdoc2.html

(It says MAC CD at the top of both documents... but the link above is really for the PC version)

General info page:

http://www.sierraplanet.com/kingsquest7/technical.html



Hope this helps!

[Alistair]

Duh, DOSBOX won't work with a Windows game.

Sierra's Windows versions of games are buggy, simple as that. KQ7 fairly so.

Win2000 is the worst OS to run Sierra games on, as well..

I suppose it's a memory problem since I also get a strange message when doing the memory test in the installation prog, telling me I don't have enough memory which is quite impossible.

The memory tests and such are ****, and are flawed by some programming glitch.

Here's a question. Is there an option, when installing the Windows version, to copy certain amounts of game data to your hard disk? If so, which did you select?

Regards,
- Alistair

[Ghost_Rider]

I run it in DOS... works for me... it's both DOS and Win right?  You can choose either one to install in.  Same as QFG4.

Then again I'm running it on a 486DX 33MHz...  But if it works there, it should work fine with DOSBOX.

[Ghost_Rider]

Since this is bugging me now I'm doing some reading.  I found out that there are different versions of the game.  The 1.x versions are WINDOWS ONLY - (v1.1 and v1.51)

Version 2.0 (which is what I have) is for both DOS and WINDOWS.  So Melle, if you have a version starting with "1", I guess I have not been any help.  Sorry about that, I didn't know the older versions were only for M$Windoze.

[Melle]

No problem, thank you so much, anyway  

Alistair: There was no such option, but I tried the suggestion of a troubleshooting guide and ripped everything from the CD on my hard drive, and tried installing from there. No success, though...

And I even considered splitting off a partition and install Win95, but you can install it on the main drive only as it seems, and since I have Linux and a bootloader installed as well, that would only be more of a curse than a blessing.