Gabriel Knight Repaired Speech - 1.0

1993 · AllTinker

NOTE: This is version 1.0 of the repair. There may be future versions. The CD release of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993) features a terrific vocal cast. Unfortunately due to 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. INSTRUCTIONS - General 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. INSTRUCTIONS - Retail CD Copy the RESOURCE.AUD file from the CD (found in the AUD/ directory) into the Gabriel Knight root directory on your hard drive. There should be a RESOURCE.000 file already in this directory. Now apply the xdelta patch to the RESOURCE.AUD file you copied over. INSTRUCTIONS - GOG Release Apply the xdelta patch to the RESOURCE.AUD file in the AUD/ directory. I also strongly recommend opening the gk1.ini file, and adding the line: aspect_ratio=true to the [scummvm] section (e.g. just after ' fullscreen=true '). It's also worth noting that you can change the line: enable_high_resolution_graphics=true to: enable_high_resolution_graphics=false ...if like me you aren't particularly into the mixed-resolution look, where interactive objects, the UI and portraits are at a higher res than everything else. NOTES Some audio quality issues are beyond the scope of at least the current version of this repair - there are also simply the limits of the oldschool encoding in effect. Under DOS, there are also some issues (I believe in the Sierra Sound Blaster driver) which cause some occasional clicking under various conditions, e.g. during scene changes. The delta patch requires an exact match for the source RESOURCE.AUD file. I haven't found any other versions of the file - if you do (you should get a checksum error), please let me know! SUPPORT If you'd like to throw me a tip you can do so via Ko-fi . You can find me on itch , Bluesky , or the web .