Here's me and RPGs, back through much of the '90s: The only RPG I know spent more than an hour or two with before getting Baldur's Gate in (early, I think) 1999 is Quest for Glory (I): So You Want To Be A Hero, VGA version. I thought it was an exceptional game, just brilliant stuff... but that's pretty much it. Apart from QFG1, I really didn't play RPGs before Baldur's Gate.
I mean, I know I played FF1 and Faria and Zelda 1 (if you count it) on the NES at other peoples' houses, and remember playing like half an hour of Pokemon sometime in 1999 or something (I hated it), and I know I played demos/shareware of stuff like PC FF7, some DOS RPG I forget the name of at the moment, and a few more... but none of those amounted to much of any actual playtime.
I did have a First Edition D&D rulebook and some Gazetteer books, though.. but never used them for an actual game, I just read them several times over. What I did play were the fantasy game boardgames Hero Quest and then later DragonStrike. Those games I absolutely loved...
... Oh right and they don't count but there was Zelda LA in late 1994 and Final Fantasy Adventure in... um, late 1998 or 1999 or sometime around then (I got the re-release). But Zelda isn't an RPG and FFA barely more of one.
There's also the latter Ultima games [7 and 8], forgot about those. On the other hand, I haven't really played either of them for more than a few minutes, so maybe they haven't held up well after all.
Been playing a little bit of Realms of the Haunting since it got released on GoG recently. It's incredibly dated, but still a fun game.
Quest for Glory 4 is actually rather difficult to get to work right on modern machines. Even back when it was released it was a buggy mess, and today the assumptions it makes about the machine you play it on leads to all sorts of crashes. In fact ScummVM has yet to support it, so DOSBox needs to be specially configured to get it up and running, with things like making sure the processor is slow enough to solve certain timing issues.
QFG1 (VGA version) and QFG3 use the exact same engine as QFG4, but without all the game killing glitches, so those should be just as accessible if you want to find them. QFG2 never had a VGA release, until fans remade it VGA style complete with importing character data from 1 and to 3. If you find a QFG collection at some point, pick that one up to play instead of the older version to fit better.
I don't ever remember having much trouble with QFG4 and I played it quite a bit back when it was originally released.
The series, as a whole, really does need a GoG release though.
QFG4 floppy disk version was infamously buggy at the time of its release, yes. It required multiple fixes, and not everyone had the internet yet then so it was a real issue. The CD version, however, which was released later, fixes almost all of the problems and is pretty stable. I've never had a problem with the CD version -- though I would recommend sticking to the DOS version, as always. Sierra's Win 3.1 engine just wasn't very good, and I think it might be less stable than the DOS version too.
Anyway, no, DOSBox doesn't need a special configuration to run QFG4 CD last time I checked... and as for timing problems, there wasn't a fix for that? I thought there was... but anyway, plenty of DOS games do have timing problems, which is why DOSBox has speedup/slowdown hotkeys.
There were still a number of bugs in the CD version. I've played it, and there are a bunch of timing issues. One has to do with a hidden counter which goes up drastically higher when the CPU is too fast, resulting in a crash very early in the game.
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Patches-Update....html#QfG4
Look on this list and you'll see a fan made patch for the CD version fixing a number of the remaining unfixed issues.
I'm pretty sure I had the CD version.
So, DJ, you just play the CD version, with the fan timing patch, in DOSBox. Works great with few issues. I believe I did play it with the timing patch, now that you remind me about it, but it's not hard to download and install, so it's not a big deal that it's sort of needed.
But yeah, the CD version fixes almost all of the issues, those timing problems aside. It's the floppy version that was really buggy. It's an incredible game though, one of the best...
You and me know about pages like Sierrahelp, but the average person just buying it off eBay or something? How are they going to know where to find fan made patches for games?
My main point is the game, out of the box, even on CD, was a buggy mess. Less buggy than the floppy version, but there's still some pretty bad bugs listed that the fan patch fixes.
There's also one other issue. Some people are purists, like me, and HATE having to resort to fan alterations of classic games just to play them correctly. There's really no telling if that fan patch is JUST a timing fix or if they inserted their ugly nickname into the ending credits or put some stupid joke they thought was just HILARIOUS midway through the game. I have some trust issues with independent developers.
Black Isle fan patches and Vampire the Masquerade fan patches have all been great. They also go into detail about what's been changed and what hasn't been.
Right. QFG has a fair-sized fan community, if those timing fixes actually did anything like that people would know. They don't.
And yeah, fan patches are usually clearly marked. The fan patches for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and Torment should all be considered essential, and all very clearly list what they do -- I always recommend enacting all bugfixes, but not any of the other changes that actually alter the game. Troika's games also generally need fan patches too, as you say GR. And again, what each thing does is well marked.
As for "but can people find them", I think that people who are going to play PC games know that patches are likely to exist, and probably will search the web for patches after they get a game... it's the only sensible thing to do. Some people won't, but then if they have problems then they'll likely do it, and hopefully find the places with the fixes. Some people might not be able to handle that, sure, but many will. People don't expect PC games to work perfectly right out of the box, particularly older ones.
Well, I'm playing DOS games again. Mainly the same ones that I already mentioned in this thread, although I am trying to get into Wasteland now.