Kings Quest games Not Launching

[AkMantis]

I launch Kings Quest from Steam. I choose the game I want to play (I've tried them all). The games try to launch but immediately close. The launcher is not effected. Any tips or hints? I am running Windows 8 - 64 bit with a I7 processor. I wouldn't think there would be a problem but so far, have not been able to play these wonderful classic games.

[Catra]

They'll run (I'm on Windows 8.1 64-bit myself) but not without some help.

Go here: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/Patches-Updates-Games/KingsQuestUpdates.html

Scroll down to the bottom and get:

King's Quest Collection DOSBox Update (KQCollectionDBUpdate) (EXE file) [1.62 MB]

and

King's Quest VII DOS Movies (KQ7_DOS_Movies) (RAR file) [20.4 MB]

The first file will patch the games to a more updated version and fix some quirks. If it whines that KQ? is already updated, ignore and patch anyway.

I think you may need to install ScummVM yourself as it only installs DosBox if you don't have it yet. Updating DosBox to the latest version is also not a bad idea.

KQ6, my personal fav, is playable with both speech and detailed character portraits. Just make sure to run it via "King's Quest 6 Win.exe". It will run via ScummVM instead of DosBox.

Don't use the launcher program that comes with Steam when you install this. It's just a box with 8 buttons on it which link to the shortcuts. I winded up adding 'non-Steam' shortcuts (basically just DosBox links).

It's a bit of a pain that you have to do all this stuff to get them to work, but they do work.

Good luck!

[AkMantis]

Thanks for the help. The updater looks like it installed the latest DosBox as well as ScummVM. I cannot get anything to launch in DosBox. In Scumm, I can play all but KQ7. When I try to add it to Scumm library it doesn't show a game as playable. Any new advice?

[monkeymadness]

Originally posted by AkMantis:

Thanks for the help. The updater looks like it installed the latest DosBox as well as ScummVM. I cannot get anything to launch in DosBox. In Scumm, I can play all but KQ7. When I try to add it to Scumm library it doesn't show a game as playable. Any new advice?

I think if you want the cutscenes for KQ7, you have to play this one in DOS. Could be wrong. Actually I'm pretty sure that ScummVM still doesn't support KQ7 (this could be out of date, but I'd rather not check). I believe that the game can be run off of XP if you don't want to use DOSBox.

[joshren]

Just move the whole collection game directory from steam to another shorter path, for example c:\games. If you have windows 8, you will be able to play 1 thru 6 using the SierraLauncher.

You should have something like this:
C:\Games\King's Quest Collection