OK, so who wants CSB for the PC?

[Gambit37]

After reading some of the messages about CSB for the PC, I guess there are a number of you who'd like to be able to play it on your PC.

Now, you must realise that however good it could be, it would never be as good as the original for obvious reasons: new monster types, special items, the end-of-game sequence, the prison - all these things would be missing.

However, if it's possible to make a dungeon that's reasonably close, and if there are enough people who are interested, then I might think about undertaking this as a project.

Reply to this thread with your thoughts and encouragement, and let's take it from there.

[Zyx]

I did a little research about making a CSB dungeon on PC with dmute:
here are some considerations:
DM vs CSB

Level DM-Monsters CSB-Monsters DM-dimensions CSB-dimensions
0__________0___________0___________18*19_________19*19
1__________2___________6___________32*32_________32*32
2__________3___________3___________32*32_________32*32
3__________6___________6___________32*32_________32*30
4__________3___________4___________30*31_________32*28
5__________3___________4___________31*32_________29*23
6__________1___________3___________30*31_________31*30
7__________4___________5___________32*32_________29*28
8__________3___________-___________31*32_________ -
9__________4___________6___________31*32_________26*30
10_________4___________4___________30*32_________27*28
11_________3___________2___________32*31_________26*27
12_________5___________-___________22*20_________ -
13_________1___________-___________26*13_________ -

This is a proposal for arranging the levels of CSB to
avoid the problems of monster limits and dimensions.

I'll send you a blank dungeon with the 2 levels of the prison (I'm not working on this project anymore), in
case it helps you. Also, I changed the offsets so they're the same as in CSB.
Good luck

[Ian Clark]

I would like one, I understand how it would have to be different. Maybe you should create a save game instead of a dungeon because you can have the characters placed already in the dungeon (the worm level) and you could also give them CSB-like stats. <p><font face=arial>Ian

Pulp - Styling the pattern for life!</font></p>

[isamu]

well, you already know how I feel, so go for it mate!

[Van]

However, even if I did not yet try to do anything with DMute, from the little I looked at it and reading some on this board I realize the extent and the complexity of the undertaking.

That's why I want to bring up this: from my earlier posts you know the situation I have encountered with CSB on PacifiST. The only thing holding me from playing is the damn keyboard thing (turning left and right keyed to the Insert and Home keys.
I am actually standing in the first room at the gate with the worms biting my ankles, have no problem with anything else, even sound or saving games. So why not do something about this keyboard stuff.

If I could make CSB run on my Win98, I assume most people should be able to also. You just run the Pacifist from Windows, it goes by itself into DOS full screen under Windows, no problems there. The IDEA is that it might be simpler to get somebody to do something about the keyboard thing than to program it via DMute. Then we could all play the real thing.
From the link below, you can download the Pacifist with bundled in CSB disks and a save game disk. The only tricky point is to get past the 'Make the Adventure' thing, which I somehow did and then all was OK except the keyboard layout.

freespace.virgin.net/
daniel.durgan/csb/csbst/
playchaos.htm

Come to think about it now, I am going to try to re-map the keyboard layout by some Window utility, to have the arrows and the Insert and Home keys all mapped to the numeric keypad. Have some doubts that will work. If it does, I'll let you know.

Van

[Gambit37]

Why don't you get WinUAE and the Amiga version of CSB? That works perfectly well on my system, and I can play it using the keyboard keypad. It even uses the original Amiga F1-F4 keys for switching player inventories which is very useful. Plus Ctrl+s to Save too, Escape to pause, etc...

[Van]

as I've been trying a number of emulators this past week, it all swims in my head.
I downloaded this version of WinUAE

UAE 0.8.8 Win32/DirectX, Release 7

but from reading the docs, it seems that I should rather use more stable ver. 0.7.x What version are you using? What ROM? Can I use one of the listed below?

Than I found some ROMs on the net but they have funny names like
Kick40.068 512KB
kick39.110 513KB
(that one has for some reason 1KB more than the rest)
So,I found 6 'ROMs', I simply renamed one of them kick.rom and started up the UAE but after the properties panel, nothing happened. So I looked a bit at settings and tried again, again nothing. Then perhaps an hour later when I forgot all about UAE, all of a sudden I got a note from Win98 that the app UAE quit for some reason, a bit later again UAE quitting. All the time you wouldn't know any UAE actually ran on my computer, except perhaps being more technical and checking which tasks are running in the background. I thought that funny but not in the way of laughing.

I think, I have to study the manual.

Also, to run CSB, should I use .adf or .adz files for the game? I have both formats. The save game disk I have is .adf file. I assume you just put these files into WinUAE install directory.

In the 'manual' it says:

"If you have a 32 bit (!) gzip.exe
installed, you can store your disk images (.adz) and ROMs (.roz) in compressed
format."

I don't know if I have the ability to expand .adz and .roz files, I am not wild about looking for and installing another decompressing utility that will take over all the files, but as I said I have the .adf files for the game and the save file.

Thx
Van

[Gambit37]

To use ADZ files (they are compressed ADF files) you need to have a program called <b> GZIP.EXE</b> in your <b> c:\windows\command folder</b>. I can send it to you if you like.

You need to create a WinUAE configuration to play CSB. I'll send you my configuration file also if you like, but I can't do this from here as I'm at work.

Let me know if you want any/all of this stuff, and I'll email it ya. mailto:thegambit@hotmail.com