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Guide to playing sierra online games w/o the CD

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First post, by avatar_58

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Sierra Online No-CD Guide
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Ok this method is rather simple and just requires a simple file edit and copying the contents of a CD. Thats all. Sound easy? Good read on:

*This guide assumes you installed the game correctly and now wish to play without having the cd in the drive. If you haven't installed yet, then do so before continuing*

First I must warn you, this method is not meant to be used to pirate or crack a game. I give this information to those who own the original sierra game CD and wish to avoid skipping and audio related issues with dosbox. I (and the vogons forum) take no responsibility for how you use this information. We do not condone piracy.

Second you are going to need a few hundred megabytes of diskspace to hold the audio files (depending on the game). During the guide I will use the following so change it according to your computer's setup -

C:\ = Your hard drive
D:\ = Your CD-ROM drive
C:\SIERRA\MYGAME = This will be the location where the game is installed to, replace with whatever you used

Ok so now you look for the resource.cfg file in your game's directory (C:\sierra\mygame\resource.cfg). All CD based sierra games will have this file. Open it with notepad. Look for any lines that say “D:\” and make note of them. You need to change them all to your game's directory (keeping the directory structure like D:\AUD intact) so in other words:

directory = \SIERRA\MYGAME

resAUD=C:\SIERRA\MYGAME\AUD
resSFX=C:\SIERRA\MYGAME;C:\SIERRA\MYGAME\PATCHES
patchDir=C:\SIERRA\MYGAME\

Basically you are changing all D:\ lines to C:\SIERRA\MYGAME and keeping the extra directories like \AUD intact. Some games will have others or less, change them all to your game's directory. Now comes the copying part. Copy the following files:

RESOURCE.000
RESOURCE.AUD
RESOURCE.MAP
RESOURCE.SFX
RESSCI.000
RESMDT.000

Some games will not have all of the above but make sure you get them all. They are located in the base CD-ROM directory (D:\) and need to be in the base game folder (C:\SIERRA\MYGAME). You may be prompted to overwrite files (especially the .000 files) just answer yes because some games install part of that file and not the whole thing (I spent a good few hours with King's Quest 7 finding that chestnut out...)

You will also need to copy all the files that end with *.HEP,MAP,SCR,MSG,SND and the files that have no extension (Larry 6 has a file named T for example). Now you need to copy over any directories that are referenced in the resource.cfg file. For our example we need the \AUD directory. Just copy the entire folder and make sure the path is correct in the resource.cfg file (if you copied it to C:\SIERRA\MYGAME\AUD then make sure the resAUD is set to that location)

At this point the game is almost playable. Now you are going to want to find the game's patch file (usually named something like MYGAME.BAT so they might say: SQ6DOS.BAT, LSL6DOS, KQ7.BAT, QFG4CD.BAT, etc) edit the file with notepad and find out what it uses to execute the program. It might just say “Sierra” which is a good thing and it means you can run the game's exe file to play. If it says something like “C:\sierra\kq7dos\sierra -o C:\sierra\kq7dos\resource.cfg “ then you are going to need to use this batch file to run the game....just make sure you edit the pathnames to point to your game's directory and not the cd-rom drive. Also look for “CHECKCD.BAT” in that batch file and remove that line since you don't want the game asking for the CD if it isn't needed.

Now remove the CD from the drive and attempt to run the game using the SIERRA.EXE or MYGAME.BAT and see if it runs. If so, check to make sure the speech is working correctly (you'll need to run the install and make sure speech=sound blaster first). If it works then you now no longer need the CD in the drive! Congrats! However if it doesn't work then something has gone wrong during the process or you got confused. Don't worry just check to make sure the paths are all pointing to your game's directory and all the right files were copied from the game's cd. If you still have trouble then try copying the entire cd contents to your game's directory as a last resort.

If you still have trouble then please contact me here: darkone58 at gmail dot com and tell me which game you are attempting, the files you copied over and include your resource.cfg in the email. I'll try to help you out! 😀

Last edited by avatar_58 on 2005-08-20, 05:47. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1 of 4, by HunterZ

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Another couple of comments:
- For Quest for Glory 4, the defaults are as follows:
resAUD=D:
resSFX=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD
patchDir=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;D:;D:\patches

I'm going to try changing it to (haven't tried yet):
resAUD=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD
resSFX=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD
patchDir=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;C:\SIERRA\QG4CD\patches

I should also mention that there're one or more spaces at the end of each line - I'm not sure whether they're important.

Edit (in response to your previous post, whcih you wrote while I was writing mine): Yeah, I actually have the game installed in D:\oldgames\sierra\qg4cd, but I mount D:\oldgames as C:\ in DOSBox.

Also, I think I shouldmove this thread to Deep Thought since there isn't anything really DOSBox-specific that you need to do to get your method to work.

Thanks for writing it up. If it doesn't let you edit it once I move it, feel free to PM me with any changes you want to make.

Edit 2 - In response to what you said in the other thread about wanting to let people comment on it: I think I'll hold off moving it for a day or two (if you want), as I think only moderators can post replies to Deep Thought threads.

Last edited by HunterZ on 2005-08-20, 05:01. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 4, by avatar_58

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Good Good it seems you understand my logic a little. You can remove duplicate paths on the same line though. You have:

patchDir=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;C:\SIERRA\QG4CD\patches

Which can be changed to:

patchDir=C:\SIERRA\QG4CD;C:\SIERRA\QG4CD\patches

😉 And no those extra spaces mean nothing.

Reply 3 of 4, by HunterZ

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A couple more things:
- You may need to copy the patches directory from the CD to your MYGAME\patches folder
- One thing I noticed is that it was using the 10-channel "base synth" MIDI mode instead of the 16-channel "extended/high synth" mode, so I wasn't hearing the trumpets or electric guitar in the title screen music. I installed the Windows version over the top of the DOS version, then ran INST /f off the CD from inside of DOSBox and did a full install of the DOS version back over the top of that. I also added:
synthtype = highsynth
to the end of my RESOURCE.WIN file. Now it sounds right in both DOS and Windows versions (although I need to fix the paths in my resource.cfg again). I'm not sure which step actually fixed what...

Reply 4 of 4, by avatar_58

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I mentioned that, all sub directories that are referenced in the resource.cfg need to be copied over and have their paths edited. Otherwise the game will go looking for them. 😅

As for the music....hmm, well I use adlib so I wouldn't have noticed. You ran the install first right? This guide is assuming the game is already installed....something I just realized I forgot to mention..

*edits* 😁