I'm getting my ass kicked in X-Com 1 by the damn psionic aliens.... 😀

Regarding the SSI RPG "Dark queen of krynn" - Yogi, my lawful good age 22 level 29 ranger keeps dying. (I hex edited his level to 29.) His status is "gone", meaning it's game over for poor ol' Yogi (the bear). Anyone know why Yogi's status keeps being set to "gone"? Perhaps he's had enough of Krynn, and is pining for Yellowstone park?

Edit: I seem to have found the specific byte inside the .sav game file that flagged Yogi as "gone". I've altered that to 1 (from 0), and in doing so have "persuaded" Yogi to come back in to service!

I have been (and still am) a cheap and shameless pirate. The few original games I have are some cartridges for my console collection (4 Sega Megadrive games, 1 Sega Game Gear game, 1 Sega MS game, 1 Super Nintendo game, 1 N64 game) and several PC games: Arx Fatalis, Gothic, Hitman 2, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (a big POS), Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Diablo 2.
And now I am playing my pirated copies of Ascendancy (love the music and the ship designs), Master of Magic, Lands of Lore (love at first sight, the first RPG I played on my PC back in the '90s) and Anvil of Dawn.

Red Baron. Just the quick missions right now but it's a lot of fun.

Next step...Aces of the Pacific, Aces of the Deep and Akalabeth!

so lately i've been playing street rod 1 and some street rod 2

Although I've finished The 11th Hour during the wee hours of Nov. 1, I picked the wrong girl (Robin) at the endgame sequence (and lost the game), so now I'm replaying this game - I got up to just before the pente puzzle in the doll house, and this time I'll make sure I pick Sam (maybe on Thanksgiving Day?).

Isn't that Mouse Trap puzzle plain frustrating?

Although I've finished The 11th Hour during the wee hours of Nov. 1, I picked the wrong girl (Robin) at the endgame sequence (and lost the game), so now I'm replaying this game - I got up to just before the pente puzzle in the doll house, and this time I'll make sure I pick Sam.

Recently, I completed Champions of Krynn and imported my victorious party (of blatant cheaters) into its sequel "Death knights of Krynn". After completing that, my party of merry cheaters got imported in to the final part of the trilogy called "Dark queen of Krynn". Well, something odd has happened. I discovered the byte in the save game file where each party member's overall status is held. Yogi, my ranger was flagged as "gone", and so I fixed that to "okay". Then, after some really fierce battles almost at the end of this game, some of my other party members got wiped out too. I fixed that with a bit of hex editing, then from that moment onwards, every remaining battle was instantly won by my party! Great I thought, as by that time I was a bit bored with all the fighting and just wanted to finish off the game. Well, it seems that the hex editing had done something really bad to the save game file, because when I encountered the dark queen herself at the end of the game, every option chosen resulted in my entire party being killed. Ack! So, now I've restarted the entire trilogy starting at Champions of Krynn, to see if I can build up a stronger party which will require less hex editing on the final "Dark queen of Krynn", which is a really tough game.

BTW, why do game designers have difficulty level settings that don't match up with their descriptive labels? I selected "Novice", and it felt more like "Almost impossible".

retro games 100 wrote:

Recently, I completed Champions of Krynn and imported my victorious party (of blatant cheaters) into its sequel "Death knights of Krynn". After completing that, my party of merry cheaters got imported in to the final part of the trilogy called "Dark queen of Krynn". Well, something odd has happened. I discovered the byte in the save game file where each party member's overall status is held.

Sounds like too much hex-editing to me, Goldbox games become weird when you set any character attribute more than 22, especially Strength.

The safer way to max out damage is to set item's bonus point to 255 (ie, Long Sword +255) instead of character attribute. The point itself won't show up on the item description, by the way. Goldbox games handle description and actual effect separately.

Also, each game has maximum allowable level for each character, for example, the maximum level for a human character in Curse of the Azure Bonds is 12 IIRC. I think it should be safer to edit hit points instead of level.

That's very interesting. Recently, I discovered that you can get your displayed character attributes to all be equal to 25 by doing this -

Set the "current" character attributes to 22
Set the "enhanced" character attributes to 25
Set the Strength Bonus (100) to 0
Set the Strength Bo.'factor' to 89

It works, but it's convoluted.

Setting an item's bonus point to 255 sounds much more promising. The "UGE" file I'm using with UGE doesn't allow you to edit an item's bonus point. Instead, I will view some of the save game files to see if I can spot where that information is being held.

I have limited all of my characters levels to 12, with the multiclass cleric/fighter/mage fighter levels set to 12/8/12. I discovered that having higher levels made Champions of Krynn (and DOSBox) go mad! DOSBox repeatedly disappeared from the desktop after memorizing spells.

retro games 100 wrote:

That's very interesting. Recently, I discovered that you can get your displayed character attributes to all be equal to 25 by doing this -

Set the "current" character attributes to 22
Set the "enhanced" character attributes to 25

Ah yes, I remember, "enhanced" attributes can be set to 25 without any ill-effects. The max point you can set for basic character attributes is 22, and you can still enjoy the effects of attribute-enhancing spells (or items) without problems.

IIRC, the only Goldbox games that allows attributes to be set above 22 without problem is the Buck Rogers series --once an old buddy of mine set his characters' Strength to 255 for instant killing.

retro games 100 wrote:

I discovered that having higher levels made Champions of Krynn (and DOSBox) go mad! DOSBox repeatedly disappeared from the desktop after memorizing spells.

IIRC my old 286 crashed when I hex-edited character levels more than the allowable maximum --don't quite remember the details though, it was almost two decades ago.

Have finished my replay of the 11th Hour a week or so ago (Sunday) and this time picked Door # 2 during the endgame sequence. it was Sam. Then watched the end sequence and saw the Stauf mansion burning, which is the correct ending!

Apparently, there's even more fighting after this celebration, then the game [Dark Queen of Krynn] finally ends.

Played Tex Murphy 1 + 2 for a bit last week, but didn't get very far as these games are simply too difficult for me (even with a w/t) so I gave up on them. Am thinking of deleting them from my netbook's hard drive (they were the free Xmas d/l's from GOG.com). Also didn't care much for them.

I'm playing Descent To Undermountain at the moment. Seriously! I bought it a year ago on ebay, and I have only just installed it. I was the only bidder. I've just read some reviews, and now I understand why.

I patched it to v1.3, and ran the game expecting the worst...Well, all I can say is that it's not that bad at all. There's plenty to like about this game. Back in the day, reviewers and customers complained about bugs, bad graphics, lack of soundcard support. However, the (probably final release) CD-ROM version I have seems to have good soundcard support: Gus and SB16 were included. I'm running the game under DOSBox, and the Gus sounded a bit stuttery, so I changed to SB16 and it sounds excellent. The actual sound effects are good - creaking doors, footsteps etc, and the music is excellent.

Other stuff I liked was just the general atmosphere - the flickering gloom in the dungeons. Looking at a walkthrough, I've played about 35% of the game. So far, the levels are all small and I think that's a good idea.

The bad points of the game - I hit a bug when during battle and the game crashed. This happened repeatedly for the same battle. I just side-stepped these opponents, and then the game was OK. The graphics are blocky. The enemies look bad, so too is their animation. I'm no good at combat, but the combat does seem weak - click on the mouse button and hope you hit. Often you don't.

Wikipedia article-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_to_Undermountain (explains why the game was bad)

There's a walkthrough here -
http://www.gamesover.com/walkthroughs/undermountain.htm

I just finished:

bought the Dangerous Dave trilogy from Softdisk, they STILL sell them!!!

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm playing Descent To Undermountain at the moment. Seriously! I bought it a year ago on ebay, and I have only just installed it. I was the only bidder. I've just read some reviews, and now I understand why.

I picked up a mint boxed copy of DTUM about 5 years ago when I started getting into retro and playing the games I never had a chance to.

The premise is spot on, D&D and the Descent engine, should have been a match made in heaven. We were all drooling at the time. Luckily I waited 8 years before I bought it to avoid paying full price, because I personally thought the game sucks and blows monkey chunks at the same time.

Even playing v1.3, creatures walk up objects but never go back down, um just hover, performance is horrid, still quest bugs and what, no 3D acceleration? This was 1997, how could this be?

bushwack wrote:

Even playing v1.3, creatures walk up objects but never go back down, um just hover, performance is horrid, still quest bugs and what, no 3D acceleration? This was 1997, how could this be?

Unfortunately, not long after I made my post above, I've hit a show stopping bug. I'm about half way through the game, and you can sense the game getting much more buggy now. Textures are missing, and replaced with weird blue stuff. Monsters don't see you. The 3D view looks corrupted in certain places, so too does your weapon. But I've gone in to a room to fetch a key, and now I can't get out. I walk to where the ladder is, walk over it, but I don't fall or go down the ladder. I'm just stuck, hovering in the air. I'm going to give this game one more chance - I'll restart it, but as a mage instead of a fighter. This way, if I get stuck at this point again, I can try to fly downwards!

I noticed in the DTU folder, there's an .exe called savefix.exe. I tried running it, and it seems to be a way of beginning a new/different mission, if your save file has got corrupted. However, it didn't seem to transport me to a new mission, because I'm stuck in the buggy mission I'm currently on.

damn, and DTUM looks nice...

keropi wrote:

damn, and DTUM looks nice...

Yeah, it's a shame. Nevertheless, I still think it's worth checking out. Perhaps you won't finish the game because of all its problems, but I enjoyed the first half of it, enough for me to restart it and try again...

Here's a boxed version on ebay, and the seller ships worldwide -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AD-D-Descent-to-Undermo … =item58868c660c