Greetings Everybody!

I'm glad I just found this thread for I wouldn't know where else to turn to rant against KQV's voice acting: I wouldn't mind suffering it a little if it just had the text as well but it's not the case - many a childhood's reminiscence ruined by it. I just read the whole topic and I wanted to ask the community something: 1) is there a way to "patch" the talkie version and add some text to it?; 2) do you think GOG will ever include the floppy version?

Thanks a lot!

There is currently no "patch" to add the text to the talkie version. Since the talkie version didn't include text, you'd have to take the text from one version and integrate it into another. Probably more work than anyone would want to do. If it was even feasibly possible. I doubt GOG will ever offer the talkie version to be honest. While there are some that want it, it's not something that's in high demand

In theory it would be possible of course, but it's really complicated.

KQ5 on floppy used an early SCI1 interpreter. KQ5 on CD used a late SCI1 interpreter, which means all sorts of things are not compatible. The translated King's Quest 5 versions are using late SCI1 interpreters too, so that's at least better (those versions had for example French or German text, but also English text as well).

BUT the way how text is stored/used is not compatible with how voices are stored and used. All sorts of scripts call voice specific things in one version and text specific things with completely different parameters in the other. Which means it would be really complicated to create patches. I guess maybe one could change how text is stored to the way voices are used, but that's a copyright issue then, because one is not allowed to distribute parts of the game and even that would require quite a lot of patching all sorts of scripts. And it would also require one to figure out a mapping between every single text in the game with a corresponding voice sample.

If it would be semi-difficult only, I would have probably already done it.

Thanks for verifying what I said ;)

The biggest problem I have with the talkie version is not the voice acting itself. It's bad, yes, but wonderfully bad.

My problem is that the compression is so thick that even if it was professional voice acting, you STILL couldn't hear crap.

The sentence "King Graham picks up the coin" becomes "Khhng Grhhm pips uh th chhn"

EDIT:

Ah whoops, I just realized I necro'd this thread. Sorry.

I +1'd you anyway. Because why not. Happy Thanksgiving!

Yeah the narrator's voice is really hard to hear. You have to really listen closely to hear him. I often had to do things multiple times to pick up on what he said.

Evidently there are multiple versions of the CD-ROM version, and it sounds like the earlier December 1991 release has less compressed audio. http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46057&p=470199

If you don't like the talkie version, the best way to play the game is gonna be using one of the floppy localizations. The 1994 collection has the French floppy disk version and it's multilingual, the only thing missing is the English text for the intro but that's easily fixed: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ggjjesuo5b99s98/KQ5FRNCH.7z

Alternatively, you could patch the 0.000.062 floppy version to fix the crash at the end: http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=11662

Just to note:

the French version has a game breaking bug right at the end, which will make the game get stuck during the final battle.
This bug gets automatically patched, when playing that version using ScummVM.

But right, interesting about the French intro. In ScummVM you can switch the game to English right from the start and this works even in KQ5 French - it says "presents" right at the start. But when you play the intro, it seems to switch to French again. Will look into that and patch it out, so that you don't have to mess around with the game in any way.

Thank god, I have the King's Quest Collector's Edition on CDs, from 1994.

Disc 1 has the French Disc version of King's Quest V, I just copied it to my hard drive, ran ScummVM, selected English language in ScummVM, and the game runs with text, without the horrible voices.

!!!!!
Dear GOG, if you are interested in adding this disc version to your King's Quest Collection and you have the rights to do so, please pm me and I upload a copy to you. It's about 10 MB.
!!!!!

This is correct.
The Roberta Williams Collection includes a KQ5 folder on CD1, but it seems it's a broken version of KQ5 CD.
It seems I didn't check the version to actually work before adding it to the wiki. I'm correcting that mistake now.

King's Quest Collector's Edition (Europe) / King's Quest Collection (US) contains the French floppy version of KQ5, which is way easier to get than an actual original French copy of KQ5. CD 1, directory KQ5FRNCH and it contains English text too.

See:
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCI/Game_Collections#King.27s_Quest_Collector.27s_Edition_.28Europe.29_.2F_King.27s_Quest_Collection_.28US.29_.281995.29

Has anyone since this thread managed to hack together a version that has both text and voices at the same time?