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So I've got the second KQ collection, and as is noted on this site's tech info, it seems that they didn't copy over the ending music track so I can't view the credits in the game.

However, I do happen to have the older collection WITH that music. I can't use it to play as part of the disk was scratched, but not the part with the song. The song itself appears to not be stored as a normal file but as a standard music CD track, which I have ripped as a WAVE file. What I'm trying to do is find out how to get the game to load this wave file directly from the hard disk by reconfiguring the game's configuration file. Anyone have any ideas? Short of finding a way to just load everything off my hard disk (including this song), my only other option would be burning a new disk with all the files plus this song as a CD track, but I'd rather not do that if it's possible to avoid it.

You might try to create a BIN/CUE of the disc and mount it with Daemon Tools.

Or if you have Nero you could use the option in which you can burn an audio/data cd and it will work that way.

I did something similar with our "upgrade" copy that doesn't include the audio track (luckily my sister has the first collection so I was able to get the track). I never did figure out a way to merge the audio track with the cue/bin short of burning to a cd-rw and dumping an image from that though.
Did anyone else notice that the 2nd sparkle in the sierra logo intro shows up on the disk version, but not on the cd?

Just play the DOS version instead which plays the song from a digital version inside the game's resource files rather than the redbook audio track. Not as good quality, admitedly, but the DOS version of the game is better than the Win version anyway.

So I've done a lot of experimenting on this and found out a few things. First off, same as Aroenai I ended up burning tha disk anyway and ripping it as a new image just to get the song combined. That does work, but I found a few unexpected things along the way.

I will also note I actually find the Windows version superior. The aspect ratio may be off and there's that title bar, but I find those worthwhile sacrifices to get the higher resolution cursors (easier to click with) and the very nice looking high resolution portraits for characters. Further, the starting video file is nicer and more fully voiced (I could take or leave the "morphing mountains" video to be honest). Unless someone knows of a way to force the DOS version to use the high resolution portraits, I'll keep using the Windows version as my preferred one. I actually use a DOSBox installation of Windows 3.11 to play the game as I find it works well for a number of things.

I tried copying the big ol' resource file (plus the "actors" folder, which seems to contain those high res portraits as the DOS version doesn't need it) to a folder and testing the DOS version with that after modifying the cfg file. It seems that when I do that, it DOES play the girl in the tower song at the end. From the disk, it doesn't, from my hard drive, it does. It's very confusing, but considering that I don't need to deal with search speeds when it's all on the disk, I'll just take what I can get there. The Windows version, under 3.11 under DOSBox anyway, doesn't seem to have a problem either way. Not really sure what happened there.

Weird, but I seem to have made it work. The data IS stored on the disk in that large resource file it seems, it just lacks the audio CD track, which for some reason... matters only when it's being looked at on a CD? It's all very strange. While I have a solution now, I'd like to keep looking at this to see if I can figure out WHY this works. I'd think that the game neither knows nor cares what medium it's loading it's data from, but maybe it does have a method of saying "oh I'm loading from a CD drive" and then being specifically programmed to load the audio track from there.

I know that Brandon likes the DOS version over the Windows version, but I am with you. I enjoy the high rez dialog images too much to be satisfied with the DOS version. I, too, prefer the AVI intro instead of the SEQ intro. The cursors are rather meaningless to me, but if anything, I prefer the smaller, less intrusive Windows cursors.

Dark Jaguar wrote:Weird, but I seem to have made it work. The data IS stored on the disk in that large resource file it seems, it just lacks the audio CD track, which for some reason... matters only when it's being looked at on a CD? It's all very strange. While I have a solution now, I'd like to keep looking at this to see if I can figure out WHY this works. I'd think that the game neither knows nor cares what medium it's loading it's data from, but maybe it does have a method of saying "oh I'm loading from a CD drive" and then being specifically programmed to load the audio track from there.

I mentioned why this was in my previous post. It's because the DOS version doesn't look for the CD audio track, but instead has a sound resource version in its own resource files. Only the Windows version uses the CD audio track. It's like the AVI/SEQ and lo-res/hi-res portraits. The DOS version just has a different way of doing it.

Also when I made my Cd with the "Girl In The Tower" along with the game data it would only work with the windows version if I tried it with the dos version it would give me an error message saying not enough memory.

MusicallyInspired wrote:
I mentioned why this was in my previous post. It's because the DOS version doesn't look for the CD audio track, but instead has a sound resource version in its own resource files. Only the Windows version uses the CD audio track. It's like the AVI/SEQ and lo-res/hi-res portraits. The DOS version just has a different way of doing it.

That makes me more confused, because in my case the DOS version doesn't work without the audio track, and the Windows version doesn't seem to care either way.

Fender_178 wrote:Also when I made my Cd with the "Girl In The Tower" along with the game data it would only work with the windows version if I tried it with the dos version it would give me an error message saying not enough memory.

Probably because the game doesn't have enough memory available to load the entire sound file of the song to be able to play it. Does it crash saying "out of hunk" or something? If that's the case try increasing the minHunk number in the resource.cfg file to something higher until it works.

That makes me more confused, because in my case the DOS version doesn't work without the audio track, and the Windows version doesn't seem to care either way.

Check your resource.cfg file and make sure it's not pointing to any directories on your CD but rather in your game folder on your hard drive where you copied everything instead. I'm running it just fine off my hard drive without the need for any CD.

The Windows version doesn't care because it's just looking for a CD track. Although the Windows version does crash for me if it can't find the CD, IIRC.