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The Adventures of Willy Beamish Help

The Adventures Of Willy Beamish's original requirements:

MS-DOS 5.0 or greater
286 or better
512 KB RAM
8.5 MB Hard drive space
VGA
Thunderboard Pro Aud Spectrum, AdLib, Roland MT-32/LAPC-1/CM-32L or SoundBlaster
Mouse

 

The Adventures Of Willy Beamish runs into problems at several points, and all of them are one of two types. There are several speed bugs (the game even opens on one), and they will not operate properly on modern processors.

Audio Problems

Audio problems are common in the later Sierra DOS SCI games. There's no single fix for all these games.

Problem - Poor Quality / No Sound (Win9x and XP):
The game has no sound or the music is of poor quality.

Solution 1 (preferred):
Play the game in DOSBox. It also will work with the MT-32 sound module, if you are fortunate to have one.

Solution 2:
Use VDMSound. The game work well with VDMSound. The sound will be as good as your audio hardware, and as with DOSBox, it works with the MT-32 sound module.

Solution 3 (DOS/Win9x):
Install DOS drivers for your soundcard. Without DOS drivers installed you won't have sound in a DOS window in Windows 9x. If you can't find DOS drivers for your soundcard, there is an alpha (developmental) version of VDMS that you can try.

Problem - Sound Effects Crash:
During the opening sequence in The Elementary School, the game may crash randomly during various events (for instance, entering the bathroom after showing Coach Buttz the pass, or if trying to sneak out while the teacher is still awake) with no error message at all. This is an issue in both DOS and Windows. It appears only when sound effects play, and only during those areas.

Solution 1 (preferred):
Play the game in DOSBox. It also will work with the MT-32 sound module, if you are fortunate to have one.

Solution 2:
Simply set the sound driver to PC SPEAKER, play through, then after you get home, turn the sound on again.

Speed problems

As with many of the Sierra VGA games, The Adventures Of Willy Beamish has some speed bugs. These bugs can also be avoided by playing the game in DOSBox. If you can't or don't want to use DOSBox, you can try using a Slowdown Utility.

Here is a list of problems with solutions/workarounds.

Problem - Rescuing Horny Bug:
Late in the game, when rescuing Horny from the Cook, even 66Mhz was too fast.

Solution #1 (preferred):
Play the game in DOSBox.

Solution #2:
33Mhz seemed to be fine, with Max Detail, will slow the game down significantly.

Solution #3:
Use a Slowdown Utility.

Game Specific Bugs

There are a couple of bugs the game has that are not speed dependent.

Problem - Game locks-up:
During the opening sequence in The Elementary School, the game may crash randomly during various events (for instance, entering the bathroom after showing Coach Buttz the pass, or if trying to sneak out while the teacher is still awake) with no error message at all. This is an issue in both DOS and Windows.

Solution #1 (preferred):
Copy this patch to the WILLY game directory and restore prior to the lock up.

Solution #2:
This appears to occur only when sound effects play, and only during those areas. Simply turn off sound, play through, then after you get home, turn the sound on again. (Note that this is not simply 'turning down the volume'--set the sound driver to PC SPEAKER).

Problem - Some Screens Too Dark:
Some screens showing up far darker than they were supposed to.

Solution:
This will not halt game play, and is not common.

 

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