King's Quest - Mask of Eternity for under 3 bucks

[Cloudee1]

So I had a Doctor's appointment yesterday and I got there about a half an hour early. Right across the road is a Goodwill so I went in to see what kind of junk they had versus sitting in the waiting room. Propped up on a shelf, all unassuming, was King's Quest the Mask of Eternity, it was in it's original box, still had the manual, quickstart guide, and the registration card. The price was a mere 2.99. Now looking at the screenshots and from what I see in the manual, I highly doubt that I will ever actually put the game in and play it, looks like I need a patch before I can even think about it anyway. But that doesn't mean that I didn't feel the overwhelming need to own it

It looks like Collector has the patch I need for Mask of Eternity as well as patches for the other King's Quest games over at  The Sierra Help Pages

[Collector]

That is just the patches page. The main thing there is the official 1.3fg patch, which is a 16-bit executable, so no go on x64 systems. I did write a 32-bit version of the patch, but never published it since the game won't even start on Vista+. The main EXE requires some serious modification to work on modern Windows, so I have an installer that unpacks the IS cab files, includes the patched and modified EXE and the official 1.3fg patch. It has some updated scripts to address the cut scene lockups on XP+.

Given when the game was released, every level is copied from the hard drive on load and deleted when done, adding long wait times on level  changes. The installer copies and unpacks the entire game to the hard drive and the EXE is modified to not delete the level files. This allows for much shorter level load times.

http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/NewSierraInstallers.html#K

[gumby]

Small development side note, I'm currently working on a command-line utility written in C to extract packed resources from .vol files for this game.  Never played the game though.

[Collector]

Is this with Aroenai?

[gumby]

Yes.  I've already created a fully working .NET program in C#, but C was the requirement (more 'lightweight' solution).