Hello,
I just purchased the KQ Collection. When Launching the KG1 I get an odd display. The bottom 2/3 of the screen is on the top. The top 1/3 of screen is on the bottom.

I changed the Display settings to 800x600 and 16 bit color. This did not change the fragmentation.

I don't seem to be able to make the setting any smaller. My screen size is 17" and I'm running Windows XP pro.

Thank you!

Have you tried playing it in DOSbox?

What is that?

http://www.dosbox.com/information.php?page=0
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Basic_Setup_ ... _of_DosBox

If you just bought the new repackaged collection, DosBox should be included. Check the manuals/paperwork that came with the collection.

Thank you,

Yes I did buy the new Collection. Unless the DosBox is on on of the two CD's (I'll check) It is not listed on the little instruction sheet.

If I download DosBox, is there anything I should know about using it before I try it?

Thanks,
Susan

I don't own the re-releases, but I believe that DosBox comes pre-configured and runs automatically when you start the games.

That is correct. When you launch the collections, you see a window with a button for each game. Click on the game you want to play, and it launches Dosbox and loads the game automatically. Everything works, including sound (which I wasn't able to get on some games before even with Dosbox. Thank you Sierra!)

Then again, I haven't tried them on Vista yet. Maybe Vista pukes as it often does with old games, but since Dosbox itself works on Vista, there might not be a problem.

Be sure to install the latest patch, which can be found on the official VU King's Quest forum. You will not be able to play past the fire cracker sequence in KQ7 without it.

Ah yes, the firecracker. Part of the problem in older games that programmers, not realizing how much faster computers would eventually become, used fixed delay loops to control timing. For any programmers in the audience, they basically did this:

for (i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
{
}

So instead of using something based on the system's real-time clock, they just made the CPU count to a million or some other number, and faster CPUs would naturally get there more quickly. There's an old game called "Kroz" (no relation to Zork) that I used to love, but it was written in the era when 16 MHz was considered blazingly fast and when I run it on a modern system, all the enemy characters kill me before I even have a chance to move, it's so fast! I have to go into Dosbox and set the frame rate really low to play Kroz, than wonder why my other games run slowly until I remember "Oh yeah, I played Kroz, so I need to set the frame rate back up fo everything else."

The Kingdom of Kroz games run very nicely in DOSBox. The collection shipped an earlier Windows only version of King's Quest VII. My patch upgrades it to version 2 with a DOS interpretor that can be played in DOSBox.