KQ8 help (GOG)

[YeOldeSierraFan]

Hey--
Got the GOG pack with KQ8 and it runs fine except it freezes at the first boss battle (with Lucreto's henchmen after getting the Ax in Daventry). Can anyone help me with this?

[Collector]

This has mostly been fixed in my installer. You can try some of the old solutions. Put your weapon away and switch to 1st person view before leaving the mill house. You can also restore to an earlier save and do things in a bit of a different order before trying for the ax. If all else fails, you can download the Daventry save game pack from here.

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Misc/SaveGames.html#K

[EricBuist]

Even with the installer, the game fails to run on Windows 7, at least the 64 bits edition. It will seem to work, because it starts and you can start walking into Daventry, but it freezes randomly at any place, and consistently after you get the Ax. I thought I had solved the freezes by disabling dynamic lighting, which I enabled at first, but it froze at the Ax place. I guess finding on which configuration the installer works will be an involving task, if it allows at all completion of the game in any Windows 7-based setup.
This is probably the Windows system which prevents running many games because of too many core changes in the OS. VMWare may help, but it is a long task to setup a Windows 98 VM and it will have a quite bad performance for gaming. You maybe able to play in the basic software mode, without any lighting and shading, from within the VM, but I guess Direct3D and 3dfx (with a wrapper) will always cause problems.
I am starting to think game computing is to an end; damned consoles took the place.

[Collector]

The installer was developed on my Win7 x64 machine. It works great on my PC and many more have used it with very good results, better in fact than the GOG release. Without seeing a log from the diagnostic tool, I would guess that it has something to do with your graphics card/driver. The Intel graphics are notorious for issues with 3-D gaming. Many of the new PCs with i3 and i5 CPUs make use of the on chip graphics. Most laptops with an Intel CPU have either onboard or on chip Intel graphics.

[EricBuist]

Hi,

I could finally get past the ax lockup by killing some goblins and zombis in the realm, then coming back. I could go through Daventry, Dimension of Death and Swamp, but with many technical difficulties. Sometimes, especially during fights, 3D becomes laggy. Sometimes, the game crashes while loading a realm. I experienced a lockup in the swamp after I saved just besides the healing point. I could not move anymore, even after reloading and restarting the game! I had to restore to a past savegame! I also think there was an unpatched bug in the golden laddle puzzle, because I could not get past this without loosing a lot of health and spending most of my potions. Last time I tried this, there was a path allowing to pass without being drained to death.

I have a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 PCI Express dedicated graphic card, not an onboard Intel crap. This is thus a bit strange that this graphic card is not powerful enough to run an old game. But many that's the case, maybe it would work better with an ATI, so now I need an ATI for Windows and a NVIDIA for Linux so I would be stuck swapping graphic card when switching between Windows and Linux.

I am suspecting the Glide Wrapper to be the cause of some of these bugs, but some of the problems were also happening under Windows XP with the original MoE installer. However, Software and Direct3D graphic options are grayed, so I suspect that without the Glide Wrapper, the game would just fail to start under Windows 7 x64. So that installer is a good effort.

Not sure I am willing to try the VMWare Win98 way or fiddle with ATI/NVIDIA graphic cards to get that oldies working.

[Collector]

The Glide wrapper in a VM gives very poor performance. I have an ATI and do not currently have any nVidia machine to test. I have not noticed the wrapper causing any issues except that with dynamic lighting enabled it can get a little laggy on some machines. You could experiment with different wrappers.

[EricBuist]

Dynamic lighting already shut off. It was causing random freezes at beginning, making game almost unplayable. Even without this, the gameplay is a bit laggy. I attached the diagnostic log.

[Collector]

Try turning off all of the compatibility mode settings.