èné wrote: Sat Dec 17, 2022 8:30 pm
@Jay - Still, as you mentionned, the spell died out by itself. I too (almost sure of it), have encontered similiar bugs in my previous playthrough. The thing that (here too), it just lasted couple of seconds. So in the end i didn't much pay attention.
If it only lasts a couple seconds, then stops, that was actually somewhat normal in the Apple IIGS version.
I believe it was because you had been tossing fireballs and bombs faster than the game could render the individual explosions, so it just queued them all up and kept playing the sequence until they were all done.
It was noticeable if you used the keyboard to unleash four PAL or MON level fireballs or lightning bolts in a row in rapid succession, and it happened all the time when I used my "Freeze the dragon and chuck everything I've got at it" strategy. I generally only used two poison bombs at a time until the poison starts to dissipate, but it did happen.
Something similar would also happen in the "make a monster" section of the kid's dungeon if you rapidly clicked on the button. It would queue up all the clicks and then take even longer to keep doing the ZO/DES EW spell effect to summon more monsters. You could even then use the keyboard to move to another button nearby and get two summon effects going at the same time.
On the other hand this had a FINITE number of times the animation would play, in direct relation to your actions.
I always thought it was a hardware limitation and that DM was pushing the Apple IIGS to its limit. The fact that the game required more memory than a stock ROM 1 Apple IIGS shipped with (The game needed just under 1.25mb. The stock IIGS had 256K on the motherboard and shipped with a memory expansion card with an additional 256K that could be expanded via kits sold separately by Apple to 1mb for a total of 1280K aka 1.25mb. If you wanted more memory you had to replace the card with a 3rd party one, which became highly recommended by 1992 to have 4mb).
gave me that impression.
tl;dr? If it happened for a few seconds then stopped, it was just the animations being queued up which take a set amount of time and you sent off too many effects in too short a time so the game had to "catch up". It's not really a bug, it's an issue due to the limited hardware of the time.
If the animations and explosions never stop, THEN it's a bug.
because it seems the game couldnt cope with all these elements. As i was throwing literaly everything at this poor chap (which has not a single chance to defend itself), I noticed that the game was beginning to respond slower & slower - but for some reason (actually the reason is that i wanted to end the game quickly), i just carried on throwing stuff
.. I played this version quite many times, and other than that, the game is absolutely bug-free (hence my surprise).