Westwood Studios Games

Audio Drivers

On less aged machines Westwood DOS games can be capricious when it comes to running them with full digital sound. One encounters game crashes, computer hanging or speech abruptly ending. Here is what helped me get them running on my Retro PC.

Miles Games

Dune 2

Simply using an alternative DMA emulation solution was sufficient. For example, I have switched from Yamaha's DSDMA.EXE to SBEMU.EXE, leaving OPL and MIDI on the PCI card, and routing digital sound to the onboard Intel HDA chip - and the game was running without problems.

My preference is generally to use VSBHDA due to better protected mode DOS extender compatibility, but for this game SBEMU actually works better.

Legend of Kyrandia CD-ROM

Producing an ISO of the game CD with patched sound drivers is necessary.

Using WestPak2 extract ALFX.DRV from SOUND.PAK in Dune II.
Using the same tool extract SB*.ADL fromm DRIVERS.PAK in Lands of Lore.
Overwrite all files with these names found on Kyrandia CD-ROM with the exctracted ones (there are multiple game data directories on the disc).
Create (and optionally) burn the ISO with ImgBurn.

Hand of Fate CD-ROM

Producing an ISO of the game CD with patched sound drivers is necessary.

Using WestPak2 extract SB*.ADV from DRIVERS.PAK on the CD-ROM.
Using the same tool patch INTRODRV.PAK replacing all SB*.ADV files with the extracted ones.
Overwrite INTRODRV.PAK with the patched version.
Create (and optionally) burn the ISO with ImgBurn.
Consider configuring your sound card to use IRQ 5 - using IRQ 7 on my system did not work with this game.

Lands of Lore CD-ROM

When using VSBHDA for digital sound and leaving OPL and MIDI on the PCI card sound works just fine. One caveat is that on my system the game eventually crashes with "PCI Parity Error" when run in FreeDOS. This does not happen when running with commercial DOS.

Malcolm's Revenge

I did not investigate which sound drivers the game uses, however it ran just fine with the VSBHDA DMA emulation. One drawback was that one needed to run the game twice for the sound to get fully initialized and work.

ALINIT.EXE is a simple utility that could be put into AUTOEXEC.BAT after loading VSBHDA to overcome this limitation - it performs initial sound card initialization and the games just work afterwards.

Note: the ALINIT trick also works for Lucas Arts games like Dark Forces or Tie Fighter CD-ROM.

Human Machine Interfaces Games

Lands of Lore II

Lands of Lore II works great with VSBHDA and actually sounds much better when configured for 16-bit sound. For MIDI music via the PCI card to work overwrite the following driver files with those found in Descent Shareware v1.0:

HMIDET.386
HMIDRV.386
HMIMDRV.386.

Note: The Descent HMI driver trick is applicable to other games as well. For example, it fixes MIDI issues with Slipstream 5000.

Gems of Kyrandia

Do you like gems? Do you also like crafts, and perhaps even glass beads? Then here's something for you - a set of designs for glass beads, based on the Legend of Kyrandia gem sprites, presented in 4 variations:

By the way, these are the IDs of the items that the script interpreter uses ingame:

0: "Garnet"
1: "Amethyst"
2: "Aquamarine"
3: "Diamond"
4: "Emerald"
5: "Pearl"
6: "Ruby"
7: "Peridot"
8: "Sapphire"
9: "Opal"
10: "Topaz"
11: "Onyx"
12: "Sunstone"
13: "Moonstone"
14: "Rainbowstone"
15: "Lodestone"
...

Gems of Kyrandia

The Birthstones Quests

Since playing the game for the first time on the Chrismas eve of 1994 I have been perplexed with the Birthstones quest from Kyrandia 1. Logic behind it was so unclear, it always felt like something bigger was concealed behind the seemingly random assignment. And so I have built SCUMMVM from source and modified Kyrandia script compiler to output the instructions in order to get a glimpse at the great mystery behind the Birthstones. And it turned out there was none: the first stone is the Sunstone (which is roughly what Darm is letting the protagonist know), the last one is the Ruby (so that the player goes through the birdy and snake quests) and the remaining two... are randomly assigned. Here, see for yourself:

[0x000002E2] op_push([12/c])
[0x000002E4] op_push([0/0])
[0x000002E6] op_sysCall([30/1e], o1_setBirthstoneGem)
[0x000002E8] op_addSP([2/2])
[0x000002EA] op_push([3/3])
[0x000002EC] op_push([0/0])
[0x000002EE] op_sysCall([61/3d], o1_getRand)
[0x000002F0] op_addSP([2/2])
[0x000002F2] op_pushRetOrPos([0/0])
[0x000002F4] op_push([1/1])
[0x000002F6] op_sysCall([30/1e], o1_setBirthstoneGem)
[0x000002F8] op_addSP([2/2])
[0x000002FA] op_push([11/b])
[0x000002FC] op_push([7/7])
[0x000002FE] op_sysCall([61/3d], o1_getRand)
[0x00000300] op_addSP([2/2])
[0x00000302] op_pushRetOrPos([0/0])
[0x00000304] op_push([2/2])
[0x00000306] op_sysCall([30/1e], o1_setBirthstoneGem)
[0x00000308] op_addSP([2/2])
[0x0000030A] op_push([6/6])
[0x0000030C] op_push([3/3])
[0x0000030E] op_sysCall([30/1e], o1_setBirthstoneGem)
[0x00000310] op_addSP([2/2])

Birthstones Temple

(A)periodic Table of (Al)chemical Elements

For Hand of Fate I have created a cheat sheet (which also makes a nice desktop wallpapaer) that describes all of the potions and their ingredients found in the game, but in a form reminiscent of the periodic chemical elements table.

Download it here.

Magicienne's Wardrobe

Zanthia, master Alchemist of Kyrandia and "the youngest member of the Royal Mystics" has certainly quite a wardrobe to showcase in the Hand of Fate. And so showcase we will - behold:

Some of these images are also available as a set of pixelated stickers for Teleram.

And here is a picture of Zanthia I've made out of Hand of Fate box art - this was way before people started using AI commonplace for this type of fancy stuff, mind you.