All right let's cut to the chase, I have no idea what I'm doing with DOSBox and to the best of my knowledge haven't used DOS in over 10 years. I don't know what the different Graphic Modes do cause whenever I launch the game it says "out of range" on my moniter as it goes to black. I'm assuming this means I can't run full screen which is what the game is automatically attempting to do.

A little help getting these games up and running would be wonderful. I'm attempting to play King's Quest 1, but I'm sure these issues will crop up when I go to play 2 and 3, so I should get that out of the way, as well. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: I did get it to open properly once, and only once as I'm unsure what I did. Whenever I run it, I have to alt-tab out of the full-screen "out of range" mode in order to force it back to a windowed mode.

You can alter the graphics modes through the start menu.

It's something like:

Start > All Programs > GOG.com > King's Quest 1+2+3 > King's Quest 1 > Graphic Mode Setup

When you select that, you should have a setup menu which allows you to change the graphics mode. A lot of people suggest using "Overlay" rather than "Surface" (the default).

Try out each of those options, to see which one works best for you. If that doesn't work, running it in a window would be the next best option (requires editing an .ini file, using Notepad or a similar text editor).

I did try using them all, but didn't notice a difference between any of them insofar as I could tell. I'd always have to tab out of the black screen due to it being "out of range" and then manually go back into the window using tabs or clicking on the DOSBox program in my task bar.

I've been able to play them as a window with almost no problems although sometimes it crashes if I leave the window for whatever reason; answering a message, bumping my mouse-keys, etc.

I'm just a tad confused as to how to get it to work in fullscreen, I guess, cause those options don't seem to be doing anything as far as I can tell.

Hi Hiro,

Short answer:
Edit dosboxKQ1.conf and change "output=surface" to "output=ddraw"
Why ddraw? No special reason, any of these should work: overlay, opengl, openglnb, ddraw.

Long answer:
I only have KQ7 and 8 but I may be able to help anyway. KQ8 doesn't use Dosbox but KQ7 does so that allowed me to do some testing and it looks to me as if that graphic mode setup program isn't working right. I think it should edit the Dosbox config file but it doesn't so maybe it's also doing nothing for you. The Dosbox config file should be in your KQ1 folder since it's in my KQ7 folder. It should be called dosboxKQ1.conf or something similar. If you can't find it, look at the properties of the icon on your desktop that launches the game. Open dosboxKQ1.conf with a text editor, maximize it and on the first page, you should see "output=surface". Change "surface" to one of the following: overlay, opengl, openglnb, ddraw. For me, all those produced 60 Hz video except for "surface" which produced 70 Hz video, which your monitor doesn't like. If you forget your choices, there's a comment line about 13 lines above that one that starts with "# output --". That line tells you your output options. Basically, I think your problem was that you were stuck in surface output mode because that Graphic output selection program doesn't work so you didn't really try the other modes when you thought you did... that is unless I'm wrong about all this. So I think you're going to have to do that for all the KQ games you play. At least it's not that big of a hassle.

Windowed mode:
If you decide to play in a window, you can set windowed mode as a default by changing "fullscreen=true" to "fullscreen=false" in that same config file.

Good luck,

--- iondrive ---

Ah, hmm... I never thought about editing the configuration file or even checking whether the output was being changed. I'll have to do that the next time I start up a game. Thanks for the suggestion.

ScummVM makes it all easier.