Ask Sierra. They didn't ask us.

nope. even I send an email to them to make contact after they released the stuff.
send a reminder as well. didn't get a response on both emails.

I've never gotten a response from Sierra for anything whatsoever. Even when I've sent them timed & delivery confirmed notices that I plan to get ahold of a copy of one of their games, I get no response. Most companies are usually very fast about responding to those 🙁 Every game I want from them, I've managed to get in a collection or compilation, so far anyways, so that make very little difference. Except one, still working on that one, but I'm not paying $100+ for it.

My only conclusion is that they planned & started putting together their first old games collection back when 0.63 was the current version, and never bothered to update.

Sierra probably felt that since .63 worked just fine to get the games working, why rock the boat with a newer release and have to test the games again.

FeedingDragon wrote:

My only conclusion is that they planned & started putting together their first old games collection back when 0.63 was the current version, and never bothered to update.

Someone at Adventure gamers analyzed the files in the collections and even at release the newest one (configuration file) was more than a year old.

It seems that they finished it and the collections were just laying around on a shelf for over a year until the marketing and sales guys finally could be bothered releasing the stuff. 😖
Maybe they were considering if they should release the collections at all or if they shouldn't bother, because it wouldn't gain them enough profits.

The games used in the new collections are a real hodgepodge from different sources. The King's Quest 6 comes from the 2nd collection but the KQ7 comes from one of the first stand alone versions (v1.4) which came without a DOS interpreter. The KQ7 that came with the 2nd collection was v2, which did come with a DOS interpreter in addition to numerous bug fixes. The Windows version is not completable on modern machines with the firecracker timer bug. I made a patch to upgrade this version of KQ7 to v2 with a DOS interpreter, which I have on my site.

Also, they selected AdLib when general MID was available. Somethings were stripped out like the DOS installer files to modify these settings. The new collections almost seem like they were put together by a bunch of very amateurish abanonwarez kids that downloaded the games from different sources.

If the games were to be just shipped with DOSBox, they would have been better off to have simply used the latest previous collections with their new launcher that used a single installation of DOSBox that would have made for an easy DOSBox upgrade path for NOOBs.