UPDATE: This patch is no longer needed, as 16-bit music has been added to official installer (beginning with 2.1.0, check your version info).

Hi there!

There have been [url=http://www.gog.com/en/forum/heroes_of_might_and_magic_series/gog_needs_to_reprocess_heroes_agg_for_homm1/post1]discussions about this before, but never any solution. Well, after some fiddling around, I may have found one, so I thought I'd share with you.

Disclaimer. This is somehow grey area regarding copyrights, so I'd like to emphasize that I am sharing this in a good will and belief it won't do any harm to Ubi, GOG or starving children in Africa. However, by following this guide, you agree that you know about this, that you have everything obtained legally and you won't hold me responsible if your house is set on fire by angry mob. You've been warned.

Patching script is licensed under WTFPL, in case I won't have time to maintain it. Basically, it's all yours. The game data are copyrighted, obviously, see above.

Download link for automatic patch:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/dtp2rj
Here's how to do it manually (eg. under linux, though if you extract the patch with 7zip, you'll find xdelta files ready to be applied):

1) Some trivia time, thanks to Tarnum GOG has the Compendium version (option 3) - as you can see, the DOS version 1.3 had stereo sound removed. There's your problem :) So now we get it back.

2) Install or unpack HoMM1 from GOG. In the installation directory, locate homm1.gog file. This is ISO image with game data. Unpack it with your favourite app, or mount and copy the files from virtual drive. You'll get HEROES directory.

3) Download this package. It contains stereo music from older DOS release. It should contain *.82S (8bit stereo) and *.62S (16bit stereo) files. Those belong in HEROES/SOUND directory you got from your ISO.

4) Re-create iso using either burning software or a specialized tool like mkisofs. Don't forget to set ISO Level 1 and DOS compatibility. It shouldn't be that much trouble if you create the image with default settings, but if your game freezes during loading, the problem is probably here.

5) Return the image where it belongs and start DOSBOX. Run SETUP.EXE from game directory. Set the Sound Card to "Soundblaster 16" and the program lets you select audio quality (finally!). Select "16bit stereo", save and exit.

6) I really recommend setting DOSBOX mixer prebuffer to 100ms, as stated elsewhere on the forum. It helps a lot with the stuttering.

7) Run the game. If everything works fine, post your results. If not, post them too :) If you don't hear any music but sound effects seem to be fine, if the game freezes in the opening animation, or if it skips it altogether, it means your ISO is broken. Redo step 4.

EDIT: Updated links again. Hope I won't have to do this every month.

I followed the directions, but HOMM doesn't like my new iso. I checked the directory structure carefully, and verified it mounts in dosbox.

I wondered if it was a compatability issue, but I did use the -iso-level 1 and -output-charset cp437 switches in mkisofs (genisoimage) as well.

I'll keep working on it.

EDIT::
Got it working when I created the image in K3B. Must be some command line switch I missed with genisofs. Anyway, I'm quite happy now, the game sounds great! It is an absolutely tremendous difference. Thank you for your efforts!

Gosh, I've noticed this thread only today and MU is down :/ I wanted to get my HOMM running with 16bit sound so would there be any possibility of reuploading the sound files?

Here you go.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/piuxup

Hopefully I'll have time to make a decent patch so ordinary users don't have to jump through all the loops. We'll see in a few days.

Feedback is always welcome :)

Thx, I'll check that when I'll be back home :) Was looking for those files for quite some time.

BTW, apart from GOG releases I've also got Windows releases which to my surprise work fine on Windows 7 (at least 32 bit Starter - I've made disc images of them). Unfortunately they both suffer from Win7 MCI handling problem and have no CD track loopings. Thus your upload is even more appreciated.

Right, I've done some basic tests today. Modifying the iso was quite easy as I've just mounted it in Windows, copied into cdburnerxp and added the extracted directory, then saved as iso.

I also had to do some modifications in gog's conf. First and foremost I had to change frequency to 44100 as the quality boost was not noticable with GOG's settings (I've already changed the settings in SETUP.EXE).

Also I wanted to switch from SB16 to GUS but unfortunatelly HoMM1 did not want to work with such settings.

Still, the game works perfectly now and I really thank you for uploading the sound files. If a patch would to be released, you would have to include a modified conf in it.

can you upload these files again?

sendspace link doesn't work

If BlackChar won't do this and you'll give me a couple of days, I can re-upload this.
Great stuff.

The link is still down.

Also, if not the files, the keywords to find them would be appreciated, since my searches didn't yield any results. Either a rip off from an old cracked dos game collection CD (DOS, no music of any kind), a windows-only version or the compendium one which only has mono.

The problem with Heroes 1 and 2 Windows version on systems higher than WinXP is that the CD music won't loop. Microsoft broke something in the file responsible for that and now any old game that uses CD music has this problem.

As for the music files: I will upload them in near future if BlackChar won't do it. I can confirm they are working great.

this is about the 16bit sound effects that were included in the original dos release but for some reason not included in the gog dos release of HOMM1. I don't know about HOMM2. Not so much the cd music which gog was nice enough to include that already as the original dos release didn't have it.

Just to clarify: as from what I observer, gog.com are using the best versions they can get. Unfortunately the fukk HoMM1 DOS version is very hard to obtain. Thus GOG are using the DOS verion provided with HoMM1 Win that had 8bit mono sound only.


There were some voices about using Windows HoMM versions, to which I replied: they will have problems with looping cd-audio and would have to be hacked into using external music files.

Bump.

New upload anytime soon?

Sorry, I've been terribly busy. Anybody knows about some filesharing service that works worldwide for free? It's actually quite hard to find one that still works, sendspace rejected the file, because it was too big. Strange, it worked the first time.

Anyways, I'll try to upload it this weekend. If not, I hope CRW will be more lucky.

Mediafire should be a good choice. We just shared a freeware game through it, a decent amount of downloads and not a single complaint (concerning the download, of course).