Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers - Playthrough Tech Corner

[dotkel50]

Glad it's not just me. Anyone know of a DOSBox setting to fix that?

[Collector]

Dot, how long ago did you install the game? That should have been fixed with more recent builds. Post the contents of your RESOURCE.CFG.

[dotkel50]

I installed it last night.

My resource.cfg:

videoDrv = VESA.DRV
soundDrv = GENMIDI.DRV
audioDrv = DACTHUND.DRV
joyDrv = NO
directory = .\
cmd = GKCD
mouseDrv = none
memoryDrv = none
minmemory = 2M
CD = YES
smartdrv = YES
mode = protected
audiosize = 63k

audio = .\;.\sfx;.\patches;.\aud
sync = .\aud
movieDir = .\seq
patchDir = .\;.\patches

[Collector]

OK, you do have the fix. The SoundBlaster driver can produce a lot of noise and static, so I set the game to use the Thunderboard driver. This seems a lot quieter more stable than SB driver, but it does not solve all noise issues. There are some occasional pops that are in the recordings themselves that have nothing to do with the settings. You can hear it in the Game Audio Player independent of the game itself. The only way to fix it would be to either re-record the sound track (good luck with coming up with enough pay Tim Curry, Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn et al. to re do it) or to extract the audio track to try to clean it up in an audio editor and then re-encode it for the game.

[dotkel50]

Naaahhhh....I'll pass. It's merely annoying, not a game breaker.

[jujigatame]

A couple of things:

1) For people having speed issues I recommend turning the cycles up to around 15000-18000. It seems to play much smoother there.

2) I'm almost certain there's some issue with the full install (copying all files to disk for CD-less play) causing the poetry quotes to not appear at the start of each day. The default mode of the game is voice-only and there's no way to change that before you start the game, so it makes little sense that the game designers would have the quotes not show up if you didn't have text set to "on". I really could be insane here, but I swear I've never played the game with text set to "on" before, and have always seen the quotes at the beginning of each day.

[Collector]

I'll look into it, but there is nothing that the installer does that would change the behavior. As to the cycles, yes you can get load times to be shorter by raising cycles, but remember that the game does have some speed bugs. I have included some experimental patches from NRS that are generally not available elsewhere, but there is no guarantee that all have been fixed. 10000 cycles is about the best compromise between load times and the chance of triggering the speed bugs. I strongly recommend leaving the cycles at 10000 to avoid crashes and other issues.

[jujigatame]

It's not the load times as much as the character's walking speed. Even when the speed is set to max in the settings, it bogs down heavily when there are multiple animations on screen at once. On my PC it is almost unplayable at 10000. At 15000 it is very much improved. If you don't experience this performance issue I wonder what is different about my setup than yours. I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 and have a fairly speedy quad-core CPU if that makes any difference. Other than the cycles I haven't changed your default dosbox.conf file at all.

The only thing I can think of regarding the pre-day text not showing up is that there may be some issue with the fact that it's the only text I can think of in the game that shows up without a voice-over. Maybe something regarding how audio and text are generally synced when playing from the CD? How do you get the game to read the audio files from the HDD, anyway? Edit some resource file?

[Collector]

How do you get the game to read the audio files from the HDD, anyway? Edit some resource file?

Of course. What version of the game do you have and can you post a save game right before the next day.

[jujigatame]

I know some people had issues with text disappearing ultra-fast when voice was turned on but audio files weren't in the expected location. I was thinking this could be related.

It's obviously not a game-breaker, just an oddity I noticed. I always did like those little pieces of poetry that kicked off each day.

[Moon Dragon]

phew... I was afraid i couldn't participate because I couldn't find the cd's for the first 2 games, but then I remembered that they they came in those paper folders instead of jewelcases, so i had put them in a different place than all my other Sierra CD's :-p . Technically my school starts in september, so I don't know how much time I actually have, but I think I should be able to sqeeze som GK time in between studies... I think this is a GREAT idea .

[jujigatame]

How do you get the game to read the audio files from the HDD, anyway? Edit some resource file?

Of course. What version of the game do you have and can you post a save game right before the next day.

I have the Sierra Originals CD version.

I will try to upload a relevant save, although the issue is visible from the start (Day 1 Intro) of the game. The first time you start it up, you will not see the quote under the Day 1 blood-scrawl banner. You can only see it if you switch text to "on" and then restart.

I am fairly ignorant as to how the resource file is structured, but my best theory is that somehow the way it's been altered makes the game treat the daily intro texts as standard in-game text that is to be accompanied by audio and governed by the "text on/off" option, rather than special text that should be displayed regardless of mode. Of course you'd be much better qualified to say if this is remotely plausible.

[Datadog]

Just tried out Collector's installer and it works like a dream. I have the audio pops too, but they seem very familiar, so I'm going to assume they've always been there. Otherwise, the speed, look and sound emulate the olden days of playing this game very well. I like it. Now all we need is an emulator that reminds me to insert new disks while playing KQ4 and my nostalgia will be complete.

I'm also surprised that I haven't played this game in ages considering it's always been within arm's reach of me for years. All I had to do was look up and snatch it out from between my copies of KQ6 and "Curse of Monkey Island" without even standing up. I wish finding my phone was this easy.

[Collector]

I tracked down the problem with the missing quotes. They go AWOL without the patch files 64924.HEP and 64924.SCR. I removed them from the installer because they cause a fatal crash in Gran's attic when you click on the clock. No easy solution here, only a clumsy workaround. You could copy them into the installed PATCHES folder, but remove them before you load the attic and replace them after.

[MusicallyInspired]

Hmmm maybe it's some kind of scripting error. Possible to be fixed I wonder? By someone who knows what they're doing of course lol.