Dungeon Master Forum

Have any authors of dungeons written for DMPC and CSBwin considered converting their dungeons to DSB or RTC? Even if you didn't want to do it yourself are there any programmers on here that would be willing to do conversions (with the authors permission of course) of dungeons written for DMPC or CSBwin.

I lived under the impression that DMPC dungeon.dat can be opened in CSBuild (although it can complain a little bit...)? Regarding CSBwin - RTC / DSB conversions, I don't see the point except sort of neverending general human curiosity (which of course is very important) - CSBwin works perfectly. Or is there any particular practical reason behind your question?

As I understand it there's no automatic conversion possible, only manual. I think that PaulH is working on a conversion / extension of some of his older CSBwin dungeons to RTC. Honestly, I'm not quite sure if it's the best idea / way to spend time because RTC seems to have some issues / bugs and is no longer being developed.

If I'm not mistaken, originaly GG developed his own editor for DM, which ended up being RTC Editor.

I actually used his tool (DMute) to open a few DM dungeons (among them, Enfers, from Zyx) and convert it to RTC .txt file, then convert it to DSB with my own tool (RTSB).

It works, but not so much: a host of things are not very well ported across versions...

Plus as long as a working version of the engine exists, I don't see the point in porting (unless you want to do a REDUX modified version).

The reason I have asked this question is that I have played a few of the DMPC and CSBwin games but if you try and play it full screen the graphics are very bitty and seem a lot slower than the ones played on DSB and RTC. I thought if some clever soul could port these over then it might re-generate a bit of interest in these games which I for one glossed over because of the problems I mentioned at the beginning.

I think that if you find CSBwin somehow 'Slower'
than RTC then there is some hidden problem
elsewhere on your system.

I have not tried playing DSB games but from
what I understand of its internals, I doubt very
much if it is faster than CSBwin.

How are you comparing the DMPC versions
with RTC and DSB?

Today, with 3 GHz machines, I think the only
thing that would make any one of these games
slow is the introduction of intentional delays to
keep them from going much, much too fast.
CSBwin, for example, allows to player to select
a speed.

Back in the old days of 100MHz CPUs, RTC
was much too slow and CSBwin zipped right along.
In fact, I regularly tested CSBwin on 40 MHz
machines to be sure I had not introduced some
unknown CPU bottlenecks.

I agree, RTC is much, much slower than CSBWin. DSB seems a lot quicker than RTC. But without some scientific measurements, it's all just personal perception.

If you read my previous message I said it "seemed" slower rather than it is slower. My main concern however is when you try to take them up to full screen and the bitmaps become very jagged compared to the latter RTC and DSB. Playing it on a screen a quarter of the size of full screen just seems odd.

Depends what you mean by 'fullscreen'. If you're running on a LCD and using fixed-ratio scale for your low-res fullscreen apps (eg, RTC & DSB), then the pixels will get slightly blurred. CSBWin on the other hand doesn't have true fullscreen, so if you increase the size of the viewport, it will remain crisp and pixellated.

I think there are two sources of the "slowness."

CSBwin is designed to, by default, tick only as fast as CSB did on an Atari ST. On the other hand, DSB runs at 5 ticks/sec, and RTC runs at 6 ticks/sec. This is faster than CSBwin's default; however, CSBwin can be sped up in its menu.
RTC and DSB redraw the screen at equal to (or close to) your monitor's refresh rate. On the other hand, CSBwin only redraws its UI when it ticks, because that's what the Atari did. This will make its GUI seem choppier. There's nothing we can do about that.

Hold on a second, I thought that CSBWin also uses the 6 ticks per second, or am I missing something again?

Personally, I've never witnessed any "slowness" in CSBWin (*). RTC runs sometimes slower on my computer when I play dunegons with more custom graphics etc. (some dungeons are even unplayable because of that) and DSB rarely slowed down weirdly / executed some things slowlier than other (hard to describe but no major problem there).

(*) Except if you pile 150 screamer slices on one tile.

I think that DMPC is probably the biggest culprit as you have to run it under DOSBOX (or I have to). And DOSBOX by virtue of its origins is slow. I think one of the niggles I find (and it may be a program thing rather than a computer thing) is the way you have to wait so long for the right hand bar (the spell bar) of the character to refresh itself. In RTC it takes a few seconds whereas in DMPC it can take upto a minute to reach full capacity again.

I tried DMPC in DosBox now and the mana regeneration is really a Neverending Story - incredible. But surely it doesn't take a few seconds in RTC?

Can't you fiddle around with the DosBox settings a bit to make it work faster? Others will help you here, I'm a Homo neanderthalensis in these things.

Jan I may have been exaggerating when I said a few seconds to refresh the spell bar in RTC but it is certainly a lot quicker than DMPC. Sometimes I can make a cup of coffee whilst thats going up again (another exaggeration lol).

The spells move a lot slower in CSBWin.