Old Dos Sierra Game ? King Quest VII

[Crazy_Chicken]

I am trying to mod one of my favorite games: King?s Quest VII
I thought it might be fun to play around with some of the graphics/audio

I?ve used SCICompanion to browse and extract some of the things I wish to improve. I?ve extracted some sprites/audio and have made some improvements; however when I apply the changes, the game breaks. I get the following message whenever I attempt to run the game with my new edits: Error 42: This game has not been version-stamped

The Error 42 shows up in the following conditions:
1) If I make my changes and run the game through SCIcompanion
2) If I use the ?Repackage Audio? option
3) If I use the ?Rebuild Resources? option, SCIcompanion gives me an error itself saying ?message.map failed with error 2: The system cannot find the file specified?

I don?t know what any of this means, I cant really find an answer to what this is; there doesn?t seem to be anything out there explaining that error code or how to correct it.

At first I thought it was because I used an incompatible graphic/sound format, but I don?t think that?s the case as simply extracting/reinserting untouched assets causes the game to not work. My best guess is that either the devs locked the archive with a hash of some sort, or there is a step I am missing in order to run with these changes.

Anyway, I am at the end of my technical ability; I?ve reached a wall I cannot pass and thought I would reach out here to see if anyone can further assist me on what I am doing wrong. Thank you!

[Kawa]

KQ7, as an SCI 2.1 game, may not be completely supported by SCI Companion to begin with. Not yet.

At any rate, the version stamping thing refers to a protection mechanism where the interpreter and game resources are a matching pair. Especially in the days of SCI 0 to 1.1, the interpreters would change a lot between games so they had the interpreters check for this "version stamp" in the resources just to make sure you didn't use the wrong interpreter/game combination, before the game would try to use a certain feature that isn't in that interpreter yet/anymore.

So what I did was two tests:

• I edited the crown cursor, view 997, to have a little smiley face on it, and saved it as a patch file. Running the game in ScummVM popped up the debugger with an error implying the file format was wrong. This is what I was implying with the "for now" bit in the first line.
• (After removing the patch file to revert the above) I extracted the original view 997 but saved it as 999.v56, the wand cursor. Running the game in ScummVM gave me... a crown instead of a wand, because the "wait" and "arrow" cursors now look the same.

What I did not do was, at any point, alter the resource files because I already knew the game would reject it from the start. For that matter, so would ScummVM since it uses hash-matching on the resource files to identify the game's version and integrity.

So you can't rightly edit most SCI 2.1 or later resources (and I can't guarantee anything about 2.0) and the interpreter can tell when the resource files are tampered with so you must limit yourself to using patch files.

[Dhel]

If you want to edit the graphics then FotoSCIhop should work without any issues. Like Kawa has mentioned, SCICompanion is not yet SCI2+ compatible. Not sure about the audio editing though.

[Collector]

FotoSCIhop is part of the TraduSCI suite that Enrico Rolfi created to translate Gabriel Knight II to Italian. It is not a full IDE, but can handle editing of some SCI32 resources. FotoSCIhop is its graphical editor to open and edit the Pics and Views of SCI32 games. http://sciwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/TraduSCI

Check Endroz Rolfi's Software Hatch site for the latest. https://erolfi.wordpress.com/tradusci/