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Police Quest SWAT - "full install" possible?

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First post, by Banjo

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Hi folks!

Pretty much a newcomer here, so hope I got this in the right section of the forums.

I'm wondering if it's possible to play the DOS version of Police Quest: SWAT (the first one) completely from the hard drive under DOSbox 0.70? I play all my old Sierra games that way now, when possible, and have most of the CD versions running fine in that way... but SWAT proved a problem since it's on more than one CD! Since the resource.sfx and resource.aud files are all different sizes, I'm assuming I need all of them to make the game run, meaning I can't just copy all the CD's contents to one directory and edit resource.cfg like I did with my other Sierra games, can I?

If anyone can help me with this (or at least let me know if it's possible, by some trick, resource.cfg editing, or even using unisci.exe as I've done for Gabriel Knight 2 and Phantasmagoria) I'd VERY much appreciate it... every time I use my SWAT CDs, they make a bit of a noise in the drive and I'd like to not have to use them whenever I want to play the game (not to mention, it's a pain switching CDs all the time!).

(Incidentally, if it matters, I've got both the 'original' release (4 CDs) and the 5 game (4 CD) PQ Collection (the UK one which didn't come with the manual... grrr!), but have trouble getting the latter to install under DOSbox, so normally install/play from the original version CDs... just mentioning this in case there is any difference between the two releases that might help)

More info needed, suggestions to try, etc. please feel free to let me know!

Cheers,
Banjo

Reply 1 of 3, by MiniMax

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You should be able to make images of the CD's (either ISO or BIN/CUE) and then mount them all in DOSBox using the

Z:\>imgmount D "C:\path\to\CD\no1" "C:\path\to\CD\no2" "C:\path\to\CD\no3"

When asked to switched CD's, press CTRL-F4 and DOSBox will "cycle" forward to the next CD.

OBS: Beware that there is a max line length limit to the DOSBox command line processor, so try to keep the paths short.

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Reply 2 of 3, by DosFreak

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Collector would know more about this but I assume you could copy all of the cd's to your HD and then modify your resource.cfg to point to those directories. I could be wrong tho.

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Reply 3 of 3, by Banjo

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Three years later, I found a solution beyond having to mount each CD... some wonderful person made a custom installer that copies the whole game - each CD - to the hard drive the way I was hoping for!

I found it quite by accident, but if anyone is digging through old posts and wanting the same thing I did, you can find it under 'new installers' on the Sierra Help Pages. A VERY nice little surprise! 😁

It's been a while, but it was a great excuse to dig out the original SWAT again!

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