Sierra manual check in older king's quest games

[flexzi]

Hi there,

i have a small problem with kings quest 4, the perils of rosella.

the game starts up just fine, but since i want a bigbox experience with as few delays and meaningless notifications as possible, one thing came up. When the game is started it asks for a certain word out of the manual for the game. if you don't type this word, the game will shut down and bring you back to launch/big box. is there a way to circumvent this? i could easily look at the manual, find the word and type it in, but that kind of defeats the ideal of playing directly without any delays. i don't want to grab a manual or open it next to my running game to look up a word to type in EVERY time i play the game!

any solutions to this?

[flexzi]

update: this also goes for laura bow: the colonel's bequest

[damageinc86]

Is it a different word on each run?

[neil9000]

I'm not familiar with these games, but I am familiar with the 80's and there versions of DRM. It may be as @damageinc86 says different every time.

[DOS76]

except he isn't saying anything he's asking if that is the case.

[neil9000]

Yeah understood, but if it is different every time its gonna be hard to automate that right? "When the game is started it asks for a certain word out of the manual for the game. if you don't type this word, the game will shut down and bring you back to launch/big box"

[DOS76]

yeah if it is different your best bet would to be start a text doc and put the word and the page number but depending on how random it may be that might not accomplish anything either. glad I only like consoles sounds like some more old school PC pain in the ass.

[flexzi]

Yeah it's a different word everytime. there's surprisingly only a handful of games. It's just that I'm running through my ScummVM emulator game-base and tried to optimize some of the video and resolutions that made me find some of these. 

 

[damageinc86]

Well then, I don't really know how to deal with that, other than actually having the manual out, and really going retro to actually use it lol.

[dragon57]

@flexzi You might be able to use ScummVM's autosave feature to get you past the initial prompt, then create a game specific override that from that point on saves to a different save slot.

[flexzi]

That would actually be a good idea. Thx!

btw, police quest 2: the vengeance has it as well...

[flexzi]

 

On 3/15/2018 at 9:01 AM, dragon57 said:

@flexzi You might be able to use ScummVM's autosave feature to get you past the initial prompt, then create a game specific override that from that point on saves to a different save slot.

hmmm this might just be a little harder than i thought. quest for glory actually uses the manual a few times through the game, at least that's what the introduction (including very angry disclaimer against copyright infringement) tells me, so that would at least be a 'no' on the savestate since you'd have to do it a couple (dunno how many) times and keep the manual close. I guess i'll just play the game with the manual if needed. 

[PhuriousGeorge]

You might do a quick search for a hacked version.  Many of these old DRM implementations were hacked out for play-ability's sake, but purists keep the originals in a lot of their sets.