What version are you using? If it's the floppy version, does this help? http://sierra.com/downloadfile.do?gamePlatfor … 6&mediaid=12360

I seem to remember issues with this on my real DOS machines back in the day as well - something about which sound driver I used maybe? You may want to experiment with, for example, choosing Thunderboard instead of Sound Blaster.

SirGraham wrote:

You can raise the Details manually but if you restart the game it will drop again. KQ5 and KQ6 will run with maximum Details if you set the CPU Cycles to 9000, but QGF3's Details bar will always be in the middle, and it doesn't matter what the CPU Cycles value is (it can even be as high as 40,000).

Once you load a saved game though, it should restore whatever setting was being used when that game was saved. The games did this on real machines as well, it's not a dosbox bug. The machine I played most of Sierra's games on back in the day needed the detail set to the lowest possible as it was rather slow; every time I started the game max detail was used, but loading a saved game would automatically resort back to the low detail.

It works fine on my verison off of the Anthology CD.

Well, the problem does seem to be related to sound, because if you configure the game to not play sound effects the lightning will be displayed, and for the correct amount of time. I tried many types of patches but they did not help.

So, I performed a test on an older computer (P2 350MHz) that has a real SoundBlaster and while the lightning did appear, it vanished really fast. On even older, more DOS-based computers (the one I used had Win98), the lightning is displayed for a longer anount of time (if I remember correctly), so it seems there is a problem in DOSBox because it's not supposed to behave like Pentium II (and don't forget that if the CPU Cycles are set to 3000 the lightning isn't shown at all, which is even worse than what happened on the Pentium II).

Incidentally, in the demo of QFG3 (which can be downloaded here), the lightning is displayed for the correct amount of time when you run it under DOSBox, regardless of the sound setting.

Servo wrote:

The machine I played most of Sierra's games on back in the day needed the detail set to the lowest possible as it was rather slow; every time I started the game max detail was used, but loading a saved game would automatically resort back to the low detail.

The games started with maximum Details on a slow machine, you say? I think that the exact opposite happens in DOSBox!

I also tried using VDMSound to test this, but for some reason I keep getting the message "Unable to initialize your audio hardware", even after using GOSiERRA. Very weird. Then again, I never used VDMSound before, so I don't know...

Hmm

Now thats odd.....I love this game and never even noticed this little problem on Dosbox. On my old pentium the lightning did remain for a longer time. Although it seems to me beyond this the game works correctly.

9000 does seem to be the sweet spot for best performance without getting the "Oops!" errors that sierra games just love to have. 😵 Although its wierd how the detail bar reacts.....

IIRC, Unable to initialize audio hardware doesn't mean anything right? The audio still plays doesn't it? I seem to remember posts about this a long long time ago.

Actually it DOES disable the sound. 😖 The best way to fix it (without using a third party patch) is simply to reduce the amount of cycles. I find that 9000 works for most sierra games.

Typically that error results from Sierra games waiting for the audio hardware to respond by a certain number of cycles instead of a certain amount of real time. At higher cycle settings (or on faster CPUs) this can mean that the game will give up on the hardware much too soon.

This was actually the first time I used VDMSound, and I was very dissapointed that the game still suffered the "Uanble to initialize your audio hardware" glitch while using it.

Did you at least reconfigure you soundcard with it running first?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean the VDMSound configuration? I'm not yet very familiar with those. Can you give an example?

I found that if you reduce the CPU usage to the minimum in VDMSound (found under the Performance tab), the "unable to initialize your audio hardware" message will not appear, but the lightning will be displayed for a very brief second. Not much help there, then.
Note: for some reason, If "Remember my settings" was checked when I pressed finish in VDMSound, the "unable to initialize your audio hardware" message did appear! Weird.[/quote]