Tommaso72 wrote:

Another thing, is this game unusual to have so many disks

Star Wars Chess from the year before was infamous for its disk count (14 1.44M's iirc) and its apology for it, and that's just half of the install process - the other half was a lengthy sound decompression process.

I believe there were two floppy releases of Rise, VGA and SVGA. Presumably yours is the latter? Mobygames has scans of a 10 disk release which must be the VGA version (which I think was slightly cheaper).

There probably aren't too many DOS games that had more than 10 disks. Ecstatica is the only other one I can think of atm, which came on 13.

Wing Commander II came on 14 x 720KB disks, Discworld on 15 x 1.44MB disks and Dragon's Lair on 13 x 360KB disks. My version of Rise of the Robots, which supports SVGA, came on 14 x 1.44MB disks. Such a waste.

These games may have a lot of floppies, but they're straightforward to use at least.

King's Quest V (16 color version) came on 16 disks, 10x 720K 3.5" and 6x 1.2M 5.25". The tenth 3.5" disk is labeled "1.2M set disk 6", and the sixth 5.25" disk is labeled "720K set disk 10", and that's by design. They are the "dual drive startup" disks for people who play entirely from floppies and have both 1.2M and 720K drives. Normal people install from the normal "startup" disk which is Disk 5 of the 1.2M, or Disk 6 of the 720K set. The game came with a sheet explaining the various complicated options of running the game. It also offered an exchange for 360K disks, which would then amount to 19 or 20 disks.

Yep KQ5 is ridiculous! It must be up there for the most unfriendly install instructions ever. Second only to the WCII warning of doom (Games that are impossible to get running)

The KQ5 disk set at least had the good manners to be readable. The other games I've added to my collection recently with large numbers of disks have had at least one bad'un.

Ecstatica (13 x 1.44MB)
Return to Zork (12 x 1.44MB)

If you read the manual for KQ5, the installation procedure as given in the instructions looks certifiable. It states that you need two different types of floppy drives to install the game! This was far from universal.

Do the highly-confusing original instructions on pages 10-13 of the 003061000 manual pertain to the 16 or 256 color version? I had always thought they were for the initial 256 color version, and the 003061203 sheet was just extra for the 16 color version, but now I'm not so sure. The only other manual I have is from the CD-ROM version, which comes with the 003061002 manual with entirely rewritten floppy disk installation instructions (the CD installation instructions are in the CD inlay).

My copy of KQ6 on 5.25s.

Just in case anyone is wondering just how crazy the KQ5 install instructions are. It seems that they realised the manual was insane and replaced it with an equally insane sheet of paper.

And here is my quick scan of the crazy original installation instructions. I still think the initial 256 color version must have come with different instructions.

NewRisingSun wrote:

And here is my quick scan of the crazy original installation instructions. I still think the initial 256 color version must have come with different instructions.

I don't think that it does, I have what I believe to be the original 256 color version. Here is a photo I took of the box contents : https://www.dropbox.com/s/gmhvrtn7iwgh57w/201 … 092047.jpg?dl=0

My manual is 003061000 and my game is 11-9-90, so I think the batshit insane install instructions were there from the beginning.

The idea was that you would keep the 3.5" disk in one drive (DD or HD, it did not matter) and swap 5.25" disks in the second drive (which had to be HD). Fortunately I believe you can install the game entirely to a hard disk with the 5.25" floppies in my version.

leileilol wrote:

Tommaso72 wrote:

Another thing, is this game unusual to have so many disks

Star Wars Chess from the year before was infamous for its disk count (14 1.44M's iirc) and its apology for it, and that's just half of the install process - the other half was a lengthy sound decompression process.

Yes, THIS!!!!

I remember when I bought that game,deleting other games and making room, and finally installing it on my 386DX-33 8MB ram (Yes the retail box said for a 486, but i had what i had at the time). And when it got to disk 13 it had a bad sector and halted the install. I was not amused, as it took forever to install to that part in the first place. Luckily a friend of mine had the game as well, and I finally got it installed (after restarting the process again). Then as you mentioned the HOURS it took to De-compress that sound files and the massive amount of space that it took on my already full 120 meg hard drive, then it ran slow as hell(but was cool to play albeit very slow). I played it for a while until my father was mad there was no room on the computer for his Harvard Graphics program to run, so i had to take it off.

Didn't Install it again for a long time. And then it was on an updated system.

Fun game, but not a great experience for installation.

All so you could play a game of chess with Star Wars characters. I think they sold Star Wars chess boards back then for about as much as the game itself, and it took only maybe one minute for someone to setup.

It's not even real SW chess. The game from the movie with the circular board. (Does it have actual rules?) Just Battlechess with cheesy SW sprites.

Errius wrote:

It's not even real SW chess. The game from the movie with the circular board. (Does it have actual rules?)

I looked into this once (back around the time VOGONS was founded). All the pieces have names and alien races mostly thanks to the collectible card game done back in the 90's. One of the tabletop RPGs has an expansion that created extremely basic rules that didn't have anything to do with which pieces do what. Star Wars Galaxies offered a chance to play but again, detail was lacking. I've seen a ruleset created by fans but I've no idea if it caught on. ... there's a bit more to this story but it ends in me getting a "nice letter" precursor to a C&D from LucasArts. 😁

Ha, that would be worth juggling dozens of floppies for. How many people bought this 1993 game thinking it was the actual game from the film?

Wow, thanks for all the response! I have not been around for a while as work is crazy. I wanted to correct something, my disks of Rise of The Robots is only on 14 disks, my bad. I ask again, is disk 2 available anywhere with proof of purchase. Probably not, but its worth a shot. Other than that I quess I will have to wait for one at a thrift shop or ebay. I thought it was quite rare to have a DOS game with so many disks, but I see there are some around with just as many. Not common still. I am sure it must have been a pain back in the day to install all those disks and fill our not so large precious hard drive space. I was lucky back then as I was spoiled with a 500 meg drive when the norm was 80. Anyways, thanks for taking time to respond and if anyone has a way to locate disk 2 of my 14 disk set, please let me know.

Tommaso72

Errius wrote:

Ha, that would be worth juggling dozens of floppies for. How many people bought this 1993 game thinking it was the actual game from the film?

Well I was a big fan of Interplay's Battle Chess at the time. And the box lets you know exactly what you are buying. So it was Star Wars Battle Chess basically. But it was a pain in the ass game to run/install.

Also I remember it gave you a choice of two backgrounds. And it made you choose at time of installation. But the only way you could change backgrounds after you installed the game was "per the instruction book" was that you had to reinstall the game again. However after sifting through some txt files I found you could just go in an rename the background file. Still what a pain, But still bore into my memory 20 plus years later. ha

;

I was a big fan of the original Battle chess as well. I got hold of it in a funny way. It was on the school computers, but they only had 3.5" drives. At home we only had an XT clone with 5.25" drives. All my friends had Amigas/Atari STs so they couldn't help. I had to ask my dad to copy it at his office. But he didn't like me playing games. What to do?

I renamed the game files something like homewrk1.dat, homewrk2.dat etc. and told him it was part of a school project I was doing. 🤣