Unfortunately, mediafire has even smaller limit (200MB as opposed to sendspace's 300MB)
anyway I recompressed the files using 7z ultra settings and it finally fit. So here you go.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3s5s37

Also, I finally finished long-promised automatic patch. It's just xdelta and simple batch file, so expect some rough edges. It should work on usual installations, though. As always, feedback is welcome, but I can't promise I won't fade into oblivion like the last time :)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/a370h8

Thank-you so much! they should include these files with the gog installer.

Thank you, I am downloading the gog_homm_patch.exe file, as I'm writing this. Will this automated patch take care of the movie files, too? I downloaded H1M.7z, but now am not sure if I should unpack it after the patch is installed, or not?
Late to the party, but anyhow: dropcanvas, which I routinely use to share GB-sized files with my colleagues. No malware, last time I used the service.

Thanks. I understand what you are saying about the files, but what still confuses me is that H1M.7z 8.8 MB, while gog_homm_patch.exe is almost 300 MB!? Something is.... odd.

It's correct. Heroes I had very few videos and they're compressed with smacker codec, so they are actually smaller than stereo game music, which takes up about half of cd. That's why the GOG release (with mono sounds and all videos) takes up only about 140MB, but old DOS release had about 550MB on CD.

Alright, thank you!

Aaand because I just love procrastination, here's an updated patch which works universally on both v1.x and v2.x installers.

It no longer uses binary patching for dosbox config files and does simple search and replace instead. This means it should work better if you made some changes to the settings.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/dtp2rj

Hi,

First of all, thanks for all the work that's gone into this high-quality sound patch. It makes a massive improvement to the game, and brings it back to how I remember playing the old CD-audio version. The sound and music in Heroes are so important that this really makes an enormous difference to the atmosphere.

Anyway, unfortunately I have bad news. I've discovered a new problem, in that the patched game now seems to freeze, where previously it didn't.

To create my sound-patched version, I started with a new installation using the recently-uploaded version 2 installer. Immediately after installing the game (even before running it once), I patched it with the universal sound patcher. Everything went smoothly. However, in the meantime I'd kept my previous version with the 8-bit mono sound. I was intending to delete it, but I thought I'd have a quick play of the newly installed version, both to enjoy the improved sound and to check that it worked OK.

It did work OK for quite some time, but then I ran into a weird problem where, at the start of a battle, the game would freeze and the sound would stop (though palette colour changes continued). The only option is to quit out of Boxer.

This problem is consistent and repeatable, and only happens in the new, patched version of the game. If I move the save-game file into my older copy of Heroes I, the freeze doesn't occur.

So I've uploaded the save-game file so that others can test it and see if the problem happens for them, too:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/grprk6

It's just an AUTOSAVE.GM1 file, to put in the GAMES directory. Load it and end the turn. The green opponent should immediately attack the castle that the blue hero is in. Just after the battle begins, the freeze occurs. It appears to be when the enemy AI tries to cast a Paralyse spell.

Note that I've seen the Paralyse spell being cast successfully earlier in the game, so I don't think it's a corrupt sound effect being triggered, for example.

Can anyone get to the bottom of this?

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce your error, since I don't have a mac to try it on. I tried your savegame on Windows and it worked just fine with both installations. Got my troops paralyzed alright, but not the game :/

I'll try digging some more when I have time. Meanwhile, you can try some workarounds by yourself. For starters, you can run HOMM setup (the DOS-based one), select the soundcard again and see if anything changes. If you choose another sound option (eg 8bit mono again) and the game still freezes occasionaly, we can be quite sure the problem lies with the new disc image; creating new one from scratch should probably help. You can also try using clean dosbox build instead of boxer to see whether some emulation patch is interfering with the game ... simply try to change your environment a bit and see what happens. I'm sorry I'm not much help at the moment, but I'll definitely mess with the game some more and get back to you once I get some results.

it may be a permissions issue? sometimes when i copy files over from windows permissions aren't set appropriately and the game is unstable/wont launch. just to check open up a terminal type

sudo chmod 755

makeing sure there is a space after 755, drag all the game files into the terminal window. then press enter. See if that fixes anything.

I can verify that the game works for me in boxer. My installation i did away with the .dat/iso image because i couldn't build an appropriate mountable dos one using disk utility. Instead I placed all cd files in a folder labeled

homm1 d.cdrom

Place it in the root gamebox folder. Boxer will take this folder and automatically treat it as a mountable cd image in D drive without any configuration.

its also a good idea, for neatness sake, to place hard drive game files in a folder called

c.harddisk

otherwise boxer will treat its root gamebox as the c drive

Many thanks for the helpful replies.

Incidentally, it doesn't seem to be a permissions issue, and actually I wouldn't really have expected a permissions problem because I didn't run the installer under Windows (or therefore in a Windows partition). I actually used a Wineskin to perform the installation, and deleted it after creating the Boxer gamebox from it. It's quicker and easier than firing up Windows (even though I do have Parallels).

Anyway, I have some interesting results to report.

First of all, experimenting with the sound card settings:

1. If I choose the sound card again, and stick with the default of Sound Blaster 16/AWE32/Compatible (option 8), then it doesn't matter which sound quality option I choose (8-bit or 16-bit); the game still freezes when the AI casts Paralyse, regardless.

2. However, if I change the sound card to Sound Blaster Pro/Compatible (option 9) – which gives me no sound quality choice and just uses 8-bit sound – then the game works fine!

I tried various other sound card choices with 16-bit sound, but they all caused the game to freeze immediately, at the spinning-world NWC logo.

Next, I modified the ISO installation.

With an isolated copy of the game, I expanded the contents of the ISO image into a folder inside the gamebox, deleted the original ISO to be certain it wasn't being used, and used the new folder as the CD-ROM with Boxer instead.

The problem was STILL THE SAME. So that proves that it isn't actually the patched ISO file itself that's causing the problem.

I hope the above tells you something meaningful! Thanks again for the help.

I meant to ask you this earlier: which patcher did you use, the earlier, binary one, or the newer, text-parsing one?

The most recent one, downloaded via the link in post 23 in this thread.

Thanks a lot. That's very helpful!