Posted September 24, 2021
Sometime somewhere I have read that there was a recopilatory edition of the 3 games of Realms of Arkania.
And there, I also read that in that special edition, all 3 games could be played with CD audio music.
The GoG version only plays with MIDI music.
Taking advantage that GoG include the full RoA 1 Soundtrack as an extra, I made myself a little experiment and tried if I could make it possible to function with CD audio.
So, first I downloaded the sountrack and made a CUE image of an audio CDROM with it.
Then I modified the game's dosbox configuration file so that it mounts the image before run the game. Simply I added the command "imgmount d RoA1.cue -t iso -fs iso".
Then, I re-run the SOUNDSET.EXE program and de-activated the MIDI music, leaving sound effects alone.
But after doing all that steps, I couldn't make it.
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So here is some questions :
1 - Is the GoG RoA1 executable capable of play CDROM audio music like that special edition did?
2 - If so, is there any special distribution of the audio tracks that must be in order to the executable game file correctly play them? (maybe a gap at the begining in which the original CD version stored the game files).
3 - Does anyone else interested in this issue achieved anything?
1) buy a German CD version of RoA1 (I still have the German boxed version released at the time...)
2) install it under a separate DOSBox installation, run it, and set it up - so that you get a sound.cfg file (!!! - running the setup stuff in the directory of the English version sets music to midi!!!) (click twice on the left arrows until you get SBPro and then confirm as usual) - start schick.bat to test
3) delete or rename bladem.exe and intro.exe from your English version
3) copy intro.exe, schickm.exe, and sound.cfg (!!!) from the German CD version to your English version of RoA1
4) rename or copy blade.dat to schick.dat and intro_a.ovl to intro_e.ovl, and schickm.exe to bladem.exe
5) add the following line to the autoexec section of the RoA1 DOSBox config file - and put it above the mount C command (!!!): mount d d:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl (provided that your CD-ROM drive is D)
6) start the game - either through the desktop shortcut or manually through a separate DOSBox installation
works beautifully and the only thing I have noticed so far is that the text in the book in the option screen (accessed via the blue exclamation mark) is in German (one line "visited Thorwal" - mind you, this might switch to English with the next entry later in the game...) - otherwise you hear the CD soundtrack and everything else is in English as far (as I have seen so far)
however, there is one little quirk - although the passport query is in English it refers to the German version, which means that simple piracy does not work - on top of that the password query only refers to page, line, and word - the German version also has column - fortunately half of the questions refer only to the map that comes with the German version which means that you do not have to worry about the column issue...
(this little piece of home surgery does by the way not work with RoA2 as the English version appears to be the floppy version plus speech pack... - however, no real loss as you can always start the game with general Midi music which sounds like the CD music...)
