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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed May 17, 2017 3:20 am

haha! That's so weird! Not a bug I recall coming across; and it sure seems like one you couldn't forget! haha. Next time I'm on the Amiga; I'll be grabbing my version of curse for you. Should be no problem transferring your saves; Just to experiment I suppose. Now I can't wait to get to curse just to find out if I'm remembering wrong or if I got lucky with my version. I've left Pool of Radiance running for over 24 hours with no issues.

It is obvious that there never again was a game quite like Pool in terms of the care and dedication put into it. That's not just for the Amiga version, I mean period. Pool of Radiance happened to be a game they decided to put in a gold box... All the other games were "the gold box games" because they found something special... and then they exploited it. Now I love those games; you can't make as many as they did unless they're good... But it was still in essence a sausage factory. The Savage Frontiers are my favorite, I love the Kyrnn games as well... But in terms of the care' the time and effort put into the game... The first one got the most love without a doubt.

Oh, regarding lighting. hahha... Yeah, sometimes I notice it, then I don't care... lol... In all honesty, it is my 100% belief my screenshots using a camera pointed at the CRT plus my editing after to make sure it looks as close to what I saw as possible - It's just beyond compare how much better it is compared to anyone using emulator screenshots... Not even putting into the conversation their distorted aspect ratios; the pixelated crap that is a straight screenshot holds no comparisons. Let me know if you end up wanting to use anything for your Pool of Radiance site review; I'll gladly send over individual screenshots if you'd like to add to yours. Let others complain about the background light; that gives me reason to bitch about straight emulator screenshots! lol - Plus - Going to be really hard for anyone to steal my stuff when it comes to those unique things that only I can reproduce. I almost don't care when people steal a straight screenshot from an emulator from someone else... It's not like they truly put any effort into taking that screenshot. All you did was copy and paste the artists original work; in fact they're stealing from the artist in a sense... Where as taking a shot of the monitor; there is skill involved in that no matter how many people want to dismiss it at first glance. Far more skill and love put into taking a shot of a CRT. And it's not just copy and pasting... I also have decided to put 4 pics in 1, another thing that will make it hard for others to steal, but also gives it a style that's all me.

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed May 17, 2017 11:13 pm

Special delivery for one Intric8; my personal copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds. Complete with my characters and saves. F.Y.I. - I got an Amiga GURU whenever I tried to load any saved game other than A. I think this is because I finished the game and transfered my characters over to Secret of the Silver Blades. You can load game A and view my characters though. Raar, as good as I am in these games, I laugh at certain decisions I made the last time I played this... Like giving my knight Bracers! Doh! Anyway, should be a simple matter of using diskmaster/DOpus and transferring your saves and characters over.

I watched the demo and even started a new game and it seemed to run just fine; of course I didn't play long enough to notice freezing issues. It is cracked' but it is the "perfect crack" - There is ZERO mention of it being cracked or of the cracking group anywhere as far as I can tell. It simply just tells you to input "A" in order to get past the copy protection. Brilliant! Let me know if you give it a go.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/16560hqxfrh5v ... e.zip?dl=0

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 9:07 am

Thanks, Shot!

I'll definitely pull these down, although I'd be shocked if there was any difference. I have 2 complete sets of the original disks - 1.0 and 1.1. But, I have seen in the 'liner notes' on WHDLoad that oftentimes cracks get a bit of bug massaging sometimes, too. At least the more modern ones do. Maybe your set falls into the Modern World - that would be cool indeed. Frankly, it has trained me to use the crap out of the Save Slots, which isn't a bad thing considering how often I have to reboot.

I feel like I'm getting fairly far along, though - I think I only have 1 or 2 "bonds" left on my arms. It's funny how they disappear right before I hop into a big battle to get my but kicked. I have to keep on re-booting and watch them vanish over and over. You'd think they would have shown these animations after completing a major step in the game, not right before.

Anyhoo - thanks again. I'll download them for safe keeping and maybe experiment with them soon. I have to decide which ADFs to put on the site whenever I finish this game and write it up! Now I've got 3 "good" sets. Hm...

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 7:55 pm

I imagine they won't work either; but my curiosity is now just super curious to pinpoint it as always happening on your system, and then I want to see if it plays just fine for me or if the game was apparently good enough I've erased any such memories of what sounds like a terrible bug that should have pissed me off so much! I feel like I would have remembered this one and if I experienced it I would have found out how to fix it...

- But did I? Will it indeed freeze for me? We might know soon; cause I'm getting super close to the castle where the great ("after all, he did do great things... Terrible things... But great") Tyranthraxus, A.K.A. "The Boss", Servant of Bane, main bastard that no matter how many times you kill him... well... You can't keep the great ones down! hahah... Spoiler alert by the way... He's one of the those villains you love to hate.

So will I find out that the game was indeed coded like shit... Or will we find out I somehow found the one version that works? Or perhaps it just does not work on your 2000.... But it works on my trusty 500... In that case it would indeed still be crap coding, but we'd have a good answer at least... I always find it so hard to believe bugs like that were something that any company would have been okay with releasing back in the day. I always find out it's some kind of emulation issue or a operating system issue, hardware issue... I'd hear the songs of games like Discovery or Fairy Tale Adventure and the songs are a garbled mess in these videos... Figured it was emulation/PAL stuff... I never remembered that stuff, but apparently they did. And indeed, I found out my Amiga 500 with how it was set up these days ended up playing those songs garbled... So I screwed with it, turned off the fast RAM, put it in NTSC mode, even turned off the extra disk drive... and there ya go! Just how I remembered it, not a garbled mess! But there are loads of people who think it was released like that... And they just had no idea what was coming for the future, it was made for the 1000. I guess it's pretty amazing it ever played right on my 500.

But I would see these videos or maybe I even heard it on the real machine myself...and I just thought "well, no... That just can't be right... It can't be...Nobody would do that..." - I give the benefit of the doubt to the designers. It's so hard for me to watch people play mid 90's Windows games these days. Might and Magic 6 is my favorite game of all time; People play it today... stretched.... But they also play it on Windows 7, Windows 10.... This thing was designed for Windows 95... They keep finding all these issues and faulting the game... I don't remember these issues! Still plays great on my Windows 98 machine! Windows 95, 98, and ME could not be more different than Windows 2000, XP, Win7, and so on.Utterly different architectures...

^ That last paragraph inspired me to write my own separate topic concerning the reselling of old games via sites like GOG.

- So I'm very curious about all of this. If this disk happens to work on your machine, if I suffered from this same issue but conveniently forgot about it, or if somehow (most baffling?) the game only works as intended on a 500, even it's bigger and very much related sister, the 2000, stumbles from issues. Hmmm... Dying to know! - But I'll need to finish Pool of Radiance before I dive deeper.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 9:03 pm

I'd be willing to accept the freeze issue as some sort of arcane hardware thing. I mean, I'm on KS 1.3, WB 1.3 and my only real mods are very old cards and chips from BITD - nothing new or wacky. I've had this issue running off the disks via floppy or installed to HD.

But that goofy sprite issue? I guarantee that is 100% code-based. It was very specific to a particular cursed weapon found in a particular dungeon. I don't think my character or class or anything like that really mattered. It spawned an SSI-created error message, the likes I've never seen before or since, but it was generate by their code. And, once I got rid of the weapon the goofy sprite bug vanished as did the error when loading the game file. So that was pretty obvious. And even still, it didn't ruin the game or make it unplayable. It was just funny/weird.

Like I said, I've read about someone who said the Sleep spell would make their Curse game freeze at odd times. Hard to say what's going on with my situation. I sometimes wonder if it is related to the sound/sound chip (Paula). Oftentimes the freeze seems to happen right before a sound effect would fire, or just start to fire, but who knows? I really don't know. Sadly, I've not figured out how to beat the Beholder yet, so I'm rebooting so much the freeze never gets a chance to pop up. I even went hunting for help and ran across an old YouTube series where, lo and behold, your comments can be found from 2 years ago! Hah! Pretty cool.

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 9:17 pm

:D You can find me in all sorts of dark and seedy places on the internet! Well, you used to be able to... Now that some jackass fake DJ stole my name for his online "radio station" it's much harder to find all that stuff... Perhaps a blessing in disguise?

Is that Blue Angelo's series by any chance? Oh; not only did I comment, I was one of his characters. I'm "Christina" - The name I choose when role playing as a girl... I mean there were nothing but dudes volunteering, it's a travesty to not have at least one girl in your party! hahha

Yeah, that's a fairly good series, other than how he cheats using the "Gold Box Companion" - which I gave him a lot of shit on... I also gave him a lot of shit for using the DOS versions. Not so much shit, but I did make it clear there were other options and that he should be aware of them.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 9:47 pm

Is that Blue Angelo's series by any chance?
Why yes, indeed it was!

And yeah - he totally cheated with the Beholder stage I'm on. Click of the button! I liked the integrated real-time map widget he was using, but the click-and-boom regeneration was weak sauce, brotha! Haha!

Don't feel bad, Christina - I'm the letter "a" away from Erica. ;)

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 10:03 pm

He was super guilty of deciding that upon having a character train; if the dice said the character would only get 1 hit point, well - Let's just add 4 or 5! Yeah, his party was ridiculously over powered at all stages of these games. Of course if anything bad happened at all (like someone getting killed or something) he'd just bring them back to life in battle. It's the game... Bitch at it if you want because of the reloading; but play it like it was designed. I think I hate the map more than anything else! Not hard to map 16x16 areas, and it's fun if you give it a try. Plus he's got the damn notations on the thing, meaning he knows exactly where everything relevant is located.

You don't need to cheat to win these games. If you map it yourself and step in every single square you will simply naturally have the necessary experience to be able to deal with these areas. Going straight to the scripted battles with minimal random encounters is not a good way to conquer these games.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 11:00 pm

I hear ya, and trust me - my feathers bristled when I saw his regenerate his character like that.

I've been stuck in this place for 2 days, and I have yet to find the right combination of squad formation, spells and luck to beat this freaking Beholder. I'm in a hallway, so the options are pretty limited.

The minotaurs and Medusas aren't a big deal at all. But by the time the Beholder gets his turn he kills 1-3 of my characters before I get to go a second time. He's impervious to magic so it's all about getting to him quickly with melee fighters, but he can throw disintegration rays all up in my business like he's sneezing on grass pollen. It's tough. I think I've restarted at least 20 times so far... It's rough. I've got everyone maxed out on haste, enlarge, prayer... dude. This game might prove to some that praying doesn't work. :P

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Thu May 18, 2017 11:20 pm

I hope you're not doomed by the game looking to challenge imported Pool of Radiance characters... It has been known to be guilty of that. Didn't you mention how you just got to level 7 recently? I just cleared the graveyard in Pool of Radiance and I have at least two level 7 characters completely legit in Pool of Radiance. Nearing the end of the first game, while you're nearing the end of the 2nd. I might be level 12 or more by the time I get to where you're at.





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