So, tried running the original Bard's Tale through the GOG pack and the animations seem to run very fast and twitchy; I doubt the original was meant to be this way?

Is there a way to adjust the emulation speed or is that just how it's going to be?

The built-in emulator has been modified to run the games faster than on real hardware, perhaps to reduce load times.

It is possible to use the ROMs in another emulator with a bit of effort (details here) which would then have the game run at the intended speed (while still having the option of zooming through the load times using a turbo hotkey).

Well, I've gone and tried those instructions, but the emulator is saying that something is wrong with the apple2gs ROM.

"341-0132-d.e12 NOT FOUND (tried in apple2gs apple2gs)"


Edit:
Well, any further tips on how to solve this? I tried substituting KEGS32 for MESS and after a bit of finagling, got that to start up, but loading the Bard's Tale disk images on that gets as far as "Waking up the monsters" and then starts throwing a bunch of cryptic machine-code-looking errors inside the emulator (as in, they look like errors in the emulated system, not Windows errors).

About ready to just try to track down the DOS version instead.

I'm having the same problem with MESS. I cannot get it to work.

Could someone take pity on me and post an actual set of instructions for getting it to work? Because I've tried what's listed in the link from Akrose and it doesn't work. I've tried various permutations of those instructions, unzipping the apple2gs file, d/l the other files that have apple2gs in their name and trying with both the zipped and unzipped versions in the 'roms' folder. I'm stumped. I've tried everything I can think of and I simply cannot get this MESS emulator to work worth a darn.

Anyone?

I also had this issue and spent quite a while trying to find a solution.

The missing file can be found in the apple2ee ROM. I extracted 341-0132-d.e12 from that, and added it to my apple2gs zip file. Afterwards, I was able to successfully launch the game.

That did it, thanks!

That fixed the ROM not found issue, but then it told me the disk images were invalid.

However, I really should have thought to try this before going off on this chase. It solved the problem with the GOG release just fine, so no need to mess around with this MESS nonsense.