My KQ4 upgrade patch is looking good. Now I've ported the game to interpreter S.old.010 (from the KQ1SCI demo).
With the system scripts updated, everything carries over with little issue, and there's MUCH more heap space available! Except... the main vocab is incompatible. Saving it as vocab.900 doesn't help.
Could SCI0 vocabs be converted to SCI1 vocabs? I know they were just compiled differently; the original source dictionary files are structured the same.
In the future, I plan to update the interpreter to 1.000.172 (from The Seasoned Professional). I know about this project which VGA-ifies the game. The only other obstacle here would be updating the Sound files to a format that's compatible with the newer interpreter. SCICompanion doesn't correctly support creation of sound resources that work with the earliest SCI1 interpreters.
Nice. Having KQ4 converted to SCI01 would of course be of great help for VGA-ifing the game. Both sounds and vocab is a known issue for me. For Vocab I just used the file from the hacked Season Professional and added words manually to get the game to compile. That did not work to well. There is a lot of "bad said spec" messsages. For sounds I found one tool in this forum for converting, but it did not work out to well. I have attached the game, go to the fishermans pier, to hear a pretty bad version of his tune.
Your post definitly makes me want to pick up this project again. After the release of ScummVMX I did create a lot of new graphics (not included in attached game) and consider releasing them for use of this engine. But decieded against it for two reasons. First that SCUMMVM including X, does not allow for any patches, and I needed to make some. Second, I have decided that I want the characters to be larger as in later Sierra games. The 34 px high Rosella is to small for me
Even if I find the 43ish px height of PQ2, Larry3, Iceman, and Qfg1 to be quite nice, for KQ4 using the indoor size of about 50px is the natural way to go.
Edit: If you want to run the attached game, you will need to enter path to dosbox in the game properties.