VOGONS


First post, by tecnico

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I have been experimenting with a Compaq Presario 7400 as a DOS retrogaming machine for some months. It is a low-end PC of circa 2000, with an AMD K6-2 533MHz CPU, a VIA MVP4 chipset with integrated video card, and an ESS ES1989 Allegro PCI sound chip. I boot Win98SE in DOS mode with Phil's boot menu, and load the appropriate ESS DOS drivers. So far compatibility with DOS games has been quite good, but for a couple of exceptions.

The first is Quest for Glory 1 VGA: some of the tunes does not sound correctly. For example, the background music in the initial scene with the Sheriff and Otto misses most of the instruments, and I hear only some irritating clicking sounds. Apart from that, the game plays just fine and I was able to complete it. Other Sierra games does not seem to have sound issues, even though I haven't played much with them.

The second, and more severe problem is with the talkie edition of Day of The Tentacle. With the speech activated, the game freezes after some minutes of play, with the background music that goes on forever. If I disable the speech, the game plays just fine. The talkie edition of Indiana Jones and the fate of atlantis works also with speech enabled.

Any suggestion on how to solve such problems? Unfortunately, the motherboard have only PCI slots, so I cannot replace the soundcard with a Sound Blaster or any other ISA card.

Reply 1 of 2, by skitters

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tecnico wrote:

The second, and more severe problem is with the talkie edition of Day of The Tentacle. With the speech activated, the game freezes after some minutes of play, with the background music that goes on forever. If I disable the speech, the game plays just fine. The talkie edition of Indiana Jones and the fate of atlantis works also with speech enabled.

There is a patch called DOTTCD.ZIP with this description:

These are replacement files which can cure problems getting digital sound with Day of the Tentacle CD-ROM on P90 or faster machines. If you get the music, but no or intermittent digitized sound and speech, these are the files for you.

You can read about it on the Internet Archive but the link there doesn't work.

It's uploaded to VOGONS in the 2nd post in this thread --> Day of The Tentacle Chopped Voice
Maybe that will fix your problem with Day of the Tentacle.