Hi everyone,
In case this flew under your radar (as it did mine), a few months ago developer
Michael Maggio (mcmagi) released a comprehensive text patch for the
King's Quest V CD-ROM version. This finally allows players to have both the full voice acting and the text dialogs simultaneously - a feature famously missing from the 1991 CD release.
What makes this particularly interesting for this community isn't just the mod itself, but the transparency of the development. Michael released the
source code and produced a
video series documenting his reverse engineering and modding process.
I think you'll appreciate the non-trivial hurdles he had to clear:
- Mismatched Content: Since the CD voiceovers are not a 1:1 match with the original floppy disk text, he manually updated the text content to synchronize with the audio.
- UI/Script Integration: The project required deep dives into core scripts including Main.sc, Talker.sc, and Interface.sc to restore functional text boxes.
- Portrait & Narrator Support: He re-implemented support for actor portraits (positioning dialog boxes relative to the portrait) and restored the decorative first letters for the narrator.
- Comprehensive Coverage: The patch covers often-overlooked areas like the death screens (Restore/Restart/Quit), the intro/ending sequences, and even the lyrics for the Ants and Weeping Willow songs.
Source Code: https://github.com/mcmagi/kq5cd-text-patchFull Playthrough: https://youtube.com/watch?v=te-6wnrZe9MDev Walkthrough: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnztmu4-lcrJ7UPuXMpiMfl0AOAU0wTFp
