DOS Patch for King's Quest VII
		for the 3rd King's Quest Collection
		 by Andrew Branscom (Collector)

This patch was created for King's Quest VII from the 3rd King's Quest Collection from Vivendi Universal, the current owners and copyright holders of Sierra and its properties, including the King's Quest games. It was made with my copy of version 2.00b from the second King's Quest Collection and the new Collection, using RLN PatchMaker ver. 0.02beta(4) from @ct Consult:

	http://www.act-consult.com/PatchMaker/

While we are happy that Vivendi Games re-released these wonderful old Sierra classics for us, they were less than perfect releases. Most of the games were set to be run in DOSBox, the open source project to emulate an older PC with DOS. 

	http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

This was reasonable approach, as it addresses hardware and Operating System incompatibilities, to recreate the environment that the games were designed to run in, thereby bypassing many of the common problems such as timer bugs, sound issues, missing APIs, etc. It also "future proofs" the games against newer versions of Windows ®. However, they shipped it with the older DOSBox 0.63, instead of the much improved version 0.65. 

Starting with Windows Vista, some versions (64 bit) will no longer be able to run 16 bit programs. The next version of Windows after Vista will only be 64 bit. This means that the Windows versions of most of the Sierra games will soon no longer run in natively Windows. 
The version of King's Quest 7 that comes with the new collection is the earlier version 1.4, which had no DOS interpreter. 

Many that upgrade to Vista will find that their copy of King's Quest 7 won't work. All that they would have needed to prevent this was to have used Version 2, which not only shipped with a DOS interpreter for the game, but had a number of bug fixes. The second King's Quest Collection used version 2.00b, which runs flawlessly in DOSBox, which will bypass the infamous firecracker timer bug. 

This patch upgrades version 1.4, Windows only interpreter to version 2.00b, with the DOS interpreter. It includes a pre-configured shortcut for DOSBox 0.65. Note that you will need to have DOSBox .65 installed in its default location:

	C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.65
							
For more information or questions, see the Sierra King's Quest message boards:

	http://forums.vugames.com/forum.jspa?forumID=113

For help with other Sierra games, see The Sierra Help Pages:

	http://www.tawmis.com/collector/

Use of this patch comes with no guarantee, explicit or implied whatsoever. Use at your own risk. 

Sierra Entertainment, Inc. ©® Vivendi Universal. Windows Vista ©® Microsoft.  RLN PatchMaker © @ct Consult. 
™ and ® indicate trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.