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When Atlantis: The Lost Tales was released by GOG I bought it immediately. This was one of my favorite games ever.

However there are many problems that are yet to be fixed.
I waited for GOG to release it with a V2 installer with a hope that the new version will be improved, but no changes were made.

The mouse in the menus remains laggy,
The puzzles are very slow (the one in the lion room, if you turn the cranks many times, mouse pointer sticks there for a couple of seconds before it is released)
Several sound effects are missing (in the original for example, in the lion room the lion's jaw made a sound effect when the puzzle was solved. After that, the secret door also made a sound effect. And the dungeon door after that too. When Seth jumped from the window there was a sound effect of him landing on the pavement)
All these and many more sound effects are missing from the GOG version. WHY?

There's also a graphic problem with the characters.
Actyon's beard for instance is shown flat instead of bushy, as it should be.
In Carbonek when I sneak outside the queen's prison cell, Gimbas comes out and there is a small conversation with the commander. The screen is shown scrambled when that happens and it is fixed some seconds later with a video of them leaving the cell.

The game itself seems to be playing solely in DirectDraw (or even slower than that). GOG should at least place a configuration option to change between DirectDraw, Direct3D or OpenGL.

When is GOG going to concentrate on fixing these issues?
I don't like paying for a game that doesn't work properly and there is no technical support.

p.s. I've tried posting similar posts in the past but no significant help was given.
Only some tips to change the affinity to both CPUs, but again there were no changes in the gameplay.
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Post edited December 06, 2013 by Jwrath
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Jwrath: When Atlantis: The Lost Tales was released by GOG I bought it immediately. This was one of my favorite games ever.
When is GOG going to concentrate on fixing these issues?
I don't like paying for a game that doesn't work properly and there is no technical support.

p.s. I've tried posting similar posts in the past but no significant help was given.
Only some tips to change the affinity to both CPUs, but again there were no changes in the gameplay.
Did you only post in the forums about this? In the forum you shouldn't necessarily expect an answer from members of the GOG staff. The proper course of action would be to contact support.
@Jwrath
all these problems are unrelated to the API used to render the game
as far as i found out, game uses DirectX 3 (you can deduce this from the directx installer version included in the original CD, and from the game release date) which is software emulated in newer OS (by directdraw as you can see)
i think the lag was introduced by GOG.com, while they were trying to limit the game framerate, in order to prevent the characters to move fast like hell
check my others posts on this forum section to fix this issue.

for the missing body parts, it seems again it's not all GOG's fault. they are only using the latest atlantis patch which was supposed to fix some problems with Voodoo3 abd Banshee graphics cards. this however introduce some graphics weirdness like the missing fisherman's beard and guards masks

i will try to cut/paste/merge something with my trusty hex editor between original exe and the patched exe of the retail version (and then port this to the GOG version.. it would be too hard to pass from original exe to GOG exe imho)..

but i'm not an expert (if only i knew assembly.. i would be able to disassemble the .exe and find the right offset to patch)
if i had any improvement i will report back

-mirh

EDIT: i tested the lion puzzle with original and GOG version.. and the jaw and door sounds seem the same
are you sure about this?

EDIT2: unfortunately i haven't the right skills for this kind of work. somebody else should look to the .exe and try to revert the changes of the patch
Post edited December 23, 2013 by pcgamingwiki
It shouldn't be up to us to fix it. The original version had it's own set of problems, but no where near as severe as this. I don't care who's fault it is, but the GOG sold it so they should fix it.
This game is notoriously difficult to even get running on modern machines. I play lots of old games and none have given me as much incompatibility trouble as this one. It did run perfectly when it was new, but it's almost a wonder that anyone can actually get it running in any version of windows after 98.
The patch mentioned earlier, which solves problems with certain graphics cards, also solves a problem where the game would crash when trying to move between two areas that have no transition (present in any Windows version after 98). So it would be impossible to play the game without it.
Cryo's old rights have gone through a million of companies in the meanwhile, so I'm not even sure who has the rights to this game any longer, but they're definitely not interested in supporting it. I don't think GOG can do anything more than they already have.
Post edited February 07, 2014 by zalbor
Depending on your setup, setting the affinity to a single core sometimes fixes this. On my core2quad this worked perfectly, but on my primary i7 rig it didn't help at all with the speed. I have not experienced the missing graphic parts so I can't comment. I'm not sure if you will find this helpful... but I do know how to get virtually all the "classic" GOG games to work perfectly. If you aren't terribly uncomfortable going outside of Windows... go out and buy yourself a USB drive, assuming you don't have one (spindle drives are quite cheap, or get yourself a decent capacity stick) if you have USB 3.0 system all the better, but 2.0 doesn't effect the speed. Get a program like YUMI or Universal USB Installer (both can be found on pendrivelinux.com) and use that to install Linux on the USB drive. I highly recommend knoppix for out of box compatibility and 3D drivers. Once in Linux install playonlinux. You can use playonlinux to install your games. Again, this is probably out of some peoples comfort zone, and I certainly wish more games ran as expected... But hey, you are playing a puzzle game so just think of this as one of those puzzles and put your thinking hat one. It's not hard. I have found this solution fixes every issue with my library. Presently I have 49 games from GOG, all working and installed on a 64GB USB 3.0 stick I can carry around with me and play on any computer I want. I also found this method works great for installing some of those older games directly that I still have the original media for, bypassing the need for GOG's developers to disassemble code and all that just to sell me a game I already have. In the case of Atlantis the only issue I see is the somewhat flailing movements of the actors in cut-scenes... which is just how I remember the game when I owned it the first time around so I really can't blame that.
Yeah, buy it with 70% promo discount and was dissapointed with perfomance and audio bugs =(