As you probably know, Sierra used those intricate two-way installer routines that will install something if it's run from a CD, and just configure sound and other relevant hardware if it runs from an HDD. No doubt, this was in part made so as to facilitate copy protection.
The demo as provided from the Sierra Help Demo Downloads page is the installer from a CD. However, it is missing a crucial part -- the BAT files which are needed to actually make the installer install the game in of three available languages: English, French or German. Based on the BAT file I grabbed from the earlier demo (which is English language only), I was able to get the three-language one back to install as intended.
Here are the two demos zipped up:
- English only: esdemo-installer.zip
- three languages: esdemo-3l-installer.zip
By tinkering with the CFG files, I was also able to produce pre-installed versions of each demo that are not tied to the CD in any way, but I generally don't like this method. So a simpler way I came up with recently is a properly installed demo with a BAT file that runs the mounting and other DOSBox commands to get it work as originally intended. You can get this version here (also has the play-in-browser function). The user can simply drag-and-drop the launch BAT file onto the DOSBox icon for this to work.
