Gabriel Knight (1993) Repaired Speech
A downloadable mod
The CD release of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993) features a terrific vocal cast. Unfortunately - due to what I believe was a mistake in their DPCM encoder - the resultant speech audio is full of clicks, pops and crackles. This persists across all known releases of the original game, including the current GOG release (ScummVM-based).
After studying the issue, I wrote a tool which decodes, repairs and re-encodes the waveforms - converted finally into a delta patch for the RESOURCE.AUD file. The patched file should work for DOS, Windows, and ScummVM versions of the game. It doesn't fix every audio issue in the game, but it makes a huge difference!
INSTRUCTIONS
You will need something which can apply LZMA-compressed xdelta patches, such as Delta Patcher (grab the appropriate file your machine, e.g. windows_bin_x86.zip). Many other implementations exist for various platforms.
Further instructions appear on the download page.
DOWNLOAD
Naturally, this is a free mod - but if you'd like to drop me a tip, it'd really help me out - and helps itch.io pay for bandwidth!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Patch v2 & ScummVM News81 days ago
- New version on the way & more!90 days ago
Comments
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Great work. It doesn't seem to apply on my Sierra Originals version, unfortunately.
Thanks for letting me know - I'll see if I can track down a copy to test...
Hmmn, I tracked down a copy with the Sierra Originals label; it's working fine here! For ref I did a "full" install (in DOSBox), copied over RESOURCE.AUD into the install directory, and ran Delta Patcher on it.
My Sierra Originals RESOURCE.AUD file seems to be the same as every other copy I've found; MD5 checksum is 0e2229c87873ca1d861cc67f1813b668, dated 1993-12-04 13:15.
I'd be very curious to hear if your copy has a different checksum/date!
Although the date and time match, the MD5 hash of my file is 510ed31b0b3c5a33bd822f5db290e00c.
I found that very unusual, because of the matching date and time. So I also did the checksum on the original CD, thinking it might have gotten corrupted on my hard drive, but the version on the CD has 510ed31b0b3c5a33bd822f5db290e00c too.
It could of course be a dodgy CD, but I've been able to play through the game itself without issues. Have attached a photo of the CD (which has the number "S0010304" on it), just so you might be able to see if it is indeed a different release somehow (I'm in the Netherlands - perhaps there is a European version that's different from the US one)?
Welp, make that a corrupted CD!
Having done a file compare between the file on the CD and the resource.aud from the GOG version, there is a difference, but only in that file, everything else on the CD matches GOG's version. The difference runs entirely from 018C3800 to 018C3FFF. Exactly 2048 bytes, which is too round a binary number to be a coincidence, and it is the sector size of a CD-ROM. So there is probably a single corrupt sector on my CD (or the master it was built from)!
In my CD's version, the 303 consecutive bytes at offset 018C3ED1..018C3FFF all have value FF, which is obviously wrong. I'll just use the GOG copy then, and apply the patch to that!
Nice, glad you figured it out! Hopefully it wasn't a bad master and it's just a one-off, but I guess we'll see if this crops up again for anyone else...
LOL I remember this issue.