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#dosgaming

22 posts15 participants3 posts today
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vga256

interplay's very unique and memorable Neuromancer rpg-adventure largely was overshadowed by their more popular titles like the bard's tale series and wasteland

perhaps because of this, there is very little primary historical research on the development of the game. i'm overjoyed to see that the Stay Forever Podcast took the time to interview lead programmer troy miles and writer-programmer bruce balfour in 2023.

both developers go into a ton of detail into life at interplay in the 1980s, the pain of writing ASM for the c64, and the twisted tale of how neuromancer was licensed to interplay via timothy leary

(fwiw, english begins after the german intro)

interview with troy:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0AoJB

interview with bruce:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKU62

The title screen for Neuromancer, showing a digitally stylized hacker's face.
#retroGaming#dosGaming#amiga
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vga256

today i was looking for a method to crack The Colonel's Bequest, so i don't have to do the ridiculous fingerprint copy protection every time i load the game

i stumbled upon chris's amazing analysis of an (in)famous one-byte crack for the game, that first appeared on BBSes in 1989. the one-byte hexedit tricks the game into forcing the first fingerprint option to be the correct one every time.

unfortunately... it has a brutal side effect: using this particular skip instruction on the engine, it destroys the randomized generation that makes Colonel's Bequest very special compared to most other adventure games. just imagine how many people's playthroughs of the game were ruined by a bad crack.
just look at all the shit it broke:

"Dead bodies are always in the first place you look
Items only appear in the west secret passages
The elevator always starts out downstairs
You're always killed when opening the closet when the killer is active
You're always killed at the end of secret passages when the killer is active
The botched Red Barron easter egg never occurs
The Southern Belle easter egg always occurs
You never get carried off by a gator at the front gates
You always see the ghost in the cemetery
The killer always walks by windows when possible
The chandelier never stops shaking, explaining this false ScummVM bug report
Everyone blinks, fidgets, and moves with lifeless constancy"
(and hundreds of more events)

it's a fab read if you're into emergent gameplay, byte code and design

www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cra

www.benshoof.orgThe Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked
#adventureGames#dosgaming
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vga256

finally discovered the nature of sierra's Gold Rush! timer bug after 25+ years of being softlocked by it, and unable to finish the game. afaik, this hasn't been documented anywhere. (edit - ha, it was - over at uhs www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/hints)

the game relies heavily upon its internal timer to trigger specific events. the first - and most important one - is getting a letter from your brother in the mail. if you don't get the letter, you get stuck 3/4 through the game.

the letter is supposed to arrive after 8 minutes. every time i've played the game, the letter never arrives. the same goes for selling your home to the real estate agent, or waiting for the rains to stop (and fields to dry out) later in the game. the events never happen.

today i discovered that you can type 'time' and it will show you the amount of actual time that has passed. on a hunch, i toggled the game between Fastest mode and Normal mode. the video shows you exactly what has happened: the internal timer never runs in Fast or Fastest mode, and the game is convinced that the clock is stuck at 04:29 forever.

i *suspect* this is probably a cpu clock speed problem, as was often the case for sierra games - many of them have buggy or nonexistent timer code that couldn't anticipate a world faster than 4mhz.

anyway, i'm just glad to have figured this out. it has plagued my dosbox playthroughs for two decades, and i can finally finish the game.

#sierra#adventureGames#dosgaming
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