Police Quest 1 - v2.0g - Disk One

[toastdieb]

Hello all,

I was directed this way by some folks on reddit after asking for help on this. On a recent trip to a local thrift store, I happened to find a complete-in-box copy of Police Quest in absolutely fantastic condition, version 2.0g, with both 3.5 disks, all three 5.25 disks, along with what appear to be backups of the three 5.25 disks. Great find, I thought to myself, I'd always heard Police Quest was great but had never played it. Well, it appears the original owner wasn't having a good day one day while trying to make a backup disk, because they appear to have formatted and overwrote disk one. The volume label is blanked out and the only thing on the disk now is "MIRROR.COM". Disk two, thankfully, appears to be fine. I don't have a 5.25 drive at the moment, so I can't check those disks to see if they're intact. I thought about buying a 5.25 drive just to attempt to repair my 3.5 disk one, but the aforementioned reddit folks suggested I try here to see if someone would be able to supply me a disk one image so that I might restore it that way.

As proof of ownership, I present you this photograph (on imgur): https://imgur.com/QWZn21v

[Tawmis]

Please let me know if what I sent you works. I believe that's the same Ver of the 3.5 PQ1 disks that I have.

[notbobsmith]

I also have the same version (2.0G, Int # 2.917). Let me know if there's a problem with Tawmis'.

[toastdieb]

Everything looks good! (imgur)

One thing I noticed, poking around after the install - Disk 2 contains a file called "VOL.3" which is checked for by INSTALLH.BAT, but the final install folder only contains VOL.0, VOL.1, and VOL.2 - is this normal? I assume "VOL.3" must simply be some compressed files which are uncompressed during the install process, but I wanted to make sure.

Thanks a ton!

[Tawmis]

Disk 2 should indeed have VOL.0, VOL.2, and VOL.3

[notbobsmith]

Kind of strange. I just tried installing from my disk images via DOSBox and it did copy the VOL.3 file. What is strange though is that the file seems to have zero bytes, both on the hard drive and in the disk image. My current installation of the game is from an older compilation CD and does not have the VOL.3 file. The other VOL files and PQ.COM all are identical according to the hashes. So while it is odd that the file did not copy during install, VOL.3 does not appear to be necessary. What I think happened is that the installation batch files are identical for the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy versions, but the 5.25" version does have a VOL.3 that is ~250 kbytes. Since they were able to cram more into the individual VOL files on the higher capacity 3.5" disks, a VOL.3 wasn't needed so they put in a dummy one for the installation.

Note: it is cool that you are running this on vintage hardware (at least I assume based on the CRT monitor); however, you may find that running AGI era games in DOSBox may offer a better experience. DOSBox emulates Tandy 3-voice sound very well. Having played these games originally on a Tandy 1000, I can't imagine listening to them in any other way.