This issue is addressed here

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Games/GabrielKnight … html#Day5Lockup

thanks for the fast reply, but I won't solve the problem with that... I've already tried these solutions, maybe it's me but it's not working. I'm running the game on a mac, how do I have to use the patches in the sierra help page? And as i said before, i'm using a mac version of dosbox, and I don't know how to apply/install windows-based patches...

NewRisingSun's patches should be dos patchers, not windows, so that works fine on Mac as well.

can you please tell me how to use the new rising sun patch? I installed the sierra update (as said in the sierra help page), but can't find a way to apply the non-sierra patch

NewRisingSun's patch is just an archive that shall be extracted into the game directory. Also check the accompanied text file.

I've downloaded the zip file and saved it in the games folder, than extracted it... I checked the txt file... it sais:
This GK1_NRS patch for the floppy version of "Gabriel Knight: Sins of The Fathers" by NewRisingSun fixes:

- Day 5: Lockup
- Day 6: Sergeant returning too early. You now have 30 seconds.
- African Snake Mound: Mummies "float" instead of walk if you
leave the room too quickly.

Note: Before installing this patch, make sure you update to the latest version of the game, first, by installing the Sierra patch.

For a self-extracting archive:
http://la2-f-anakin.sierra.com/patches/pc/gkpat.exe

or in a ZIP:
www.tawmis.com/collector/Files/Patches/ ... at10b).zip

Extract these files into a temporary directory (run the self-extracting archive) and follow the instructions in README.TXT.

the two links are dead...

no fixes in the game by now... what am i doing wrong?

Patches are available on the same page:
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/Pat … iesUpdates.html

Anyways maybe somebody else can comment on the bug since the comments sound
like that specific bug should *not* occur when playing the DOS version of the game
in dosbox (so it could be a problem with Mac+dosbox).

I read about running the game in dosbox... it should work, but it's not my case. I also tried to change settings in the boxer inspector but nothing changes in game
other dos games seems ok, and the boxer should work fine for mac...

Try the official dosbox release rather than what boxer uses.

i managed to get the game working: I checked the RESOURCE.CFG with text edit and changed the line patchDir in patchDir = .\;.\PATCHES (found that suggestion round the web), then I copied all the patch files in game's folder, substituting the older ones... hope this helps other players with the same problem

Nice you got it working, and thanks for reporting back!

If you contact him, it should especially help the author of Boxer to implement that fix, if possible in some way.

So what is he going to do? Pack every DOS game patch ever made in Boxer? The problem was simply that the patch was misapplied. Is he also going to include game configuration files for all DOS games as well? It was a game issue, not a DOSBox or Boxer issue.

I've tested with my own (floppy-disk) copy of Gabriel Knight, and the Day 5 freeze does occur in both Boxer and in the standard DOSBox 0.74, on Mac and Windows.

The Sierrahelp pages do state that the bug should not occur when running under DOSBox, but either that was a mistake or it was true only for older versions of DOSBox (perhaps around the 0.6 era.)

The latter is a possibility, and I may sit down and try out some older versions to see if they give different results. But if this cannot be solved by configuration alone then there's really nothing Boxer can do about it, as collector notes.

Yeah that might be interesting if it got broken at some point, if it's easy to test for the bug.

I guess that some are missing half of the the thread. The other half is on the SHP forums. barbuto had tried to apply the NRS patch for the floppy version of GK1. This issue is a timer bug, which can also be avoided by running DOSBox at a lower cycles setting. I would think that Boxer can't take into account all of the DOS games that have timer bugs. Yes, Sierra may have been more guilty of this than other developers, but it is not just limited to Sierra.

What barbuto did not do is to make sure that he placed the patch files where the game could find them or to adjust the RESOURCE.CFG to point to them. After he edited his RESOURCE.CFG what I had instructed him to change it to, the game was able to find the NRS patch files. I don't know how barbuto setup his game, but I would suspect that all of the patch files from the installation had been placed in a "PATCHES" folder and the RESOURCE.CFG pointed to that folder, so the game did not look to its base directory for the files. Changing "patchDir = .\PATCHES" to "patchDir = .\;.\PATCHES" will get the game to also look in both its base and not just the PATCHES subdirctory.

This is why I went the route of my installers. So many games have specific configurations and needs that go beyond what is reasonable for any one frontend to deal with. Patching games is also something that would not be easily handled through a frontend. I can easily deal with any game on a case by case basis to account for this, properly patch it and give it an optimal configuration. Problem is, they are Windows only. WINE seems to work with NSIS installers, but somethings may fail, such as concatenating resources. Even so, Linux users would still have to modify the installation afterwards to get it to use their Linux port of DOSBox and modify the mounting and shortcuts accordingly.

I have had requests for Mac version of my installers, but I am not familiar enough with scripting on the Mac to do so. I would be willing to host any Mac or Linux versions of my installers, if anyone is able and willing to do the scripting. Dominus at one point had looked into it for the Mac, but got too busy to continue.

I really need to get back on this...

Thanks for the detailed writeup, collector.

Boxer actually does automatically reconfigure several hundred games that are known to have compatibility problems with the default emulation settings, and I was hoping to add GK to this list.

However, I've tested my copy of GK with cycles settings of 3000, 8000, 10000 and max, and with normal core and dynamic core; no combination of speed and CPU emulation settings so far has made any difference with this particular bug. Exactly what CPU settings are known to prevent the freeze from occurring?

I should note that the GK1_NRS patch (in combination with the official patches) also did not prevent the freeze for me. I placed the patch files in the game's base folder, alongside resource.cfg - the patch path was set to .\ in the resource.cfg file, which I presume is the default.

What core did you use? Usually, 10000 is low enough to avoid most of the Sierra timer bugs, but some need as low as 6000. I don't use dynamic core for any version before SCI32.

As far as the patch path, the base directory was used from SCI0 up until sometime around the middle of the SCI1 games, when they started to place them in a "PATCHES" directory. The SCI0 games do not recognize a "patchDir" setting in the RESOURCE.CFG file. A couple of the earliest SCI games do not recognize any resource files outside of what is packed in the main RESOURCE.00* file (i.e. the very first releases of KQ4 and LSL2). For the games that do recognize the "patchDir" setting, using "patchDir = .\;.\PATCHES" will allow the patches to be placed either in the game's base directory or in a "PATCHES" folder.

One further note about the Sierra patches, most of the patches merely consisted of the raw updated resource files (.SCR, .HEP, .P56, V56, etc.), some were binary difference patches that need a DOS or NTVDM environment to run in to update the unpatched resources. The official Sierra patch for the floppy version of GK1 is such a patch. Accommodating the requirements for all of the Sierra games can get to be rather involved. This is why it is not really reasonable for a frontend to include all patches, configurations and other fixes. My Sierra patch collection approaches near 1 GB in size. Perhaps additional individual packages. But that gets to be not much different from my installers.

If anyone has a save game for version 1.0 of the floppy version that is from right before the lockup, please post it here. Do not forget the catalog file, too. I don't have saves for the floppy version.