Yes, it is a very old game, but I have found something out when I played it not long ago.
Alas, there were some application-crashs as well as logical and translation errors in the game and it isn't so good as I had it in my memories. But I still enjoy this game very much, even if I recognize errors now more than in those days.
When I was about to find out where the MIDI files are saved, I used some diagnostic tools. With a file monitor I found out, that the game tries to read out "C:\Carlos.kq7", but this file doesn't exist. What's that? Let's create such a file. Now start the game.
You'll see that you are now in a kind of debug mode. When the game starts, you can select which chapter you want to go to. And you have special items which you should not have at the beginning of the game. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 4 you have missing rat of the grave digger. So you can proceed faster. Also, you can decide if you want to get textoutput instead of speech output (which would be great for people who cannot hear anymore).
Now I still found some special key combinations (probably only works if you create a new game):
- Press Ctrl+B. It seems that you can extract bitmap files with several aspects (interface?). Also, you can enter a description for the room... But I couldn't create the bitmap, maybe because the original files are on CD, not on hard disk.
- Press Ctrl+S to debug something with the SCI sound database. But the program crashes. Maybe I have entered some wrong values. At my side, there were weird results. Every next session of the game crashed with MMSystem-Errors, some time also the music of the old KQ7-sessions were overlapped and the game speed increased very high. But two times my Win98 session crashed. Please be careful...
- Press Ctrl+R to see some element debugging data. (NOT documented in Alt+H!)
- Press Ctrl+Z to make the music more silent. Maybe a programmer didn't like the music and didn't knew sndvol32... (NOT documented in Alt+H!)
- Press Alt+Q to show you current coordinates.
- Press Alt+W to edit waypoints ("features?"). After you pressed enter, the game wants to ask you to safe a FEA file. This is probably a waypoint file.
- Press Alt+E to see some debug details for the current animation.
- Press Alt+R to see debug details about the room.
- Alt+T lets you jump into another chapter.
- Alt+Z vanish some items? But the game crashes at my side.
- Alt+I LETS YOU GET EVERY ITEM IN THE GAME YOU WANT!!!
- Alt+K ... load palette? I don't see any change. (listed in Alt+H)
- Alt+U ... unknown... (listed in Alt+H)
- Alt+O let you scale objects
- Alt+P let you see the current coordinates
- Alt+L let you enter bug reports into a directory you choose... Damn, there are so many bugs in this program, someone has to fix them... The staff didn't work correct in those times. (Maybe because they spent their time in creating a complex hidden debug mode?)
- Alt+J loads an picture into the scene!
- Alt+H shows the help of the debug mode... mh... that's what I am doing right now...
- Alt+G sets variable
- Alt+F sets flag
- Alt+D changes debug mode
- Alt+S shows all objects
- Alt+A some other informations about objects.
- Alt+X exit the game very fast
- Alt+V show waypoints
- Alt+B let waypoints/polygons edit. Leave with ESC. You are promted to enter a filename for a POL file to save. Press Alt+V to see the change of the waypoint (overlap the last information).
- Alt+M Free memory... Why did the developer add that feature into the debug mode? Just a waste of time in my opinion.
That sounds everything interesting... I wish I were in that developer staff, it was sure a lot of fun, even if programming is lot of work.
Thank you, Carlos!
There is also something strange: The game tries to find all files in its directory: V56, P56, SCR, SND, VOC, FON, PAT, PAL, WAV, AUD, SYN, MSG, MAP, HEP, CHK, TRN. Also, before a sound is played, a AUD and then a WAV file is searched. If it won't be found, the resource file will be accessed. So you could patch the game if you would give the game a non-compressed source file. For example: 4000.AUD and 4000.WAV is the music of the ooga-booga land house and 4080.AUD/WAV is the ooga-booga grave digger's theme. Mh... I thought that were MIDI files... why does the game search for WAV files and play them if they are existing? Also, the AUD resources are wave-types. You can test it by copying an AUD file from a foreign Sierra product like Lighthouse into the folder with the correct name. The AUD will be played. SND files are probably MIDI-like files. If at least one SND file was found in the directory, also SNDs will be searched for each requested sound, so they can be patched. (Order: AUD, WAV, SND). The question is still, what format a Sierra-SND has...
If you still play the game and maybe you have found something new out (maybe more new features/items in the debug mode?), then please e-mail me! I'm very interested!
In feature I will try also to get success in following:
- Try to extract real MIDI files form the resource files (maybe also a possibility to change translation errors in BMP and WAV files?)