So I want to get everything set up right for my first ever playthrough of GK1 ! I've read the PCgamingwiki and I see two issues mentioned : the day 5 phone call lockup and the day 6 police station timing.

I'm wondering :

1. does the current GOG version (that runs with ScummVM) still has theses issues ?
2. if so, what's the best way to fix them ? Should I install any of thoses patches, or shoud I try to mess with CPU cycles in ScummVM (and how) ?

Thank you. This is reassuring :)

ScummVM fixes these issues (and more) on-the-fly. You don't have to do anything, in fact installing such fan patches may cause problems.

That is largely true. However, I experienced no bugs with GK1, even when simply running the game on DOSBox. It is a very different situation than with Quest for Glory III or IV.

Oh, and in view of our discussion on that series' forum, remember that I used both Ashlancer's fan patch and ScummVM on QFG4, and it ran with almost no bugs (aside from some that neither fix ever corrected). I'm not saying that fan patches never cause trouble (I remember one that caused me problems with Ravenloft: Stone Prophet), but they sometimes be really helpful.

I think the rule about "use the usual care with downloading online software" applies here too.

Gabriel Knight 1 has quite a few timer bugs, which means if you have too powerful hardware / run DOSBox with too many cycles, you will get problems. Certain events are using cycles instead of seconds, which causes them to execute way too fast on such machines. And there is a special VESA hires mode for Gabriel Knight 1, which uses some hires views/sprites in certain places and which makes the game run at a higher resolution, and which requires more horse power. More horse power requires more powerful hardware.

But overall Gabriel Knight 1 has just a few issues. Compared to games like QfG4, it was quite well tested (except for these timer issues). One of the problems tons of these fan patches have is that they will invalidate your saved games.
This means that if you remove them, your saved games will not work any longer. That's not the case for the on-the-fly patches in ScummVM. Localized versions of games are also patched properly in ScummVM, because these on-the-fly patches are dynamically applied, but fan patches are typically for one version and one specific release of the game (most of the time English of course) and if you apply them to a localized release, they may break the game.

If you know about unfixed bugs in QfG4, you should report them to the ScummVM bug tracker to get them fixed. QfG4 is a big buggy nightmare, especially the original floppy disc release.

Anyway others introduce new bugs, the QfG3 fan patches come to mind, and as said previously, when you encounter these bugs, you can't just remove the fan patches, otherwise you have to restart the game from scratch. This is the case for QfG3.

There are also some fan patches, which contain bugs like reading from uninitialized memory. And bugs like these may cause actual problems for some people in some situations, but may work fine for others. Sierra had these type of bugs in their games as well. Problem is that their game engine did not initialize certain types of memory / reused memory without resetting it.

m_kiewitz: All of your points are valid, and I have had good results with ScummVM myself, so I don't think there's anything wrong here, but I do have to note: all your time on GOG's forums seems to be spent promoting ScummVM.