Does anyone know where to find CSB for PC?

[+owain ddantgwyn]

I have looked for a PC version of Chaos Strikes Back, but I wasn't able to find any. Could anyone help? I tried the ST version downloaded from the unofficial DM site, but besides its being very slow and having a few bugs, I found it very unpractical to have to use the home and insert keys to turn around. Tnaks a million to those who could help.

[cowsmanaut]

there is a DMUTE dungeon made to seem as close to CSB as possible and there is the ST and Amiga versions of the real thing here on this board.
DM was ported to the PC very late and so when it came time for CSB to be ported it wasn't practical since there were things like Doom and heretic to compete with.
Not enough demand untill now when all the ST and Amiga users now own PC's.
This is the reason the DMCLONE project plans to release CSB for PC.
there is no release date for this yet and it will be free.
cheers

[Gambit37]

DM came out on the PC in 1989/90, four years ahead of Doom and suchlike, so I doubt that was the reason that CSB didn't make it to the PC. I think it was more to do with the fact that FTL were porting DM to every format under the sun, and were starting their plans for DM2.

Is the DM clone project using original materials from CSB? If so, bad idea. FTL still own the copyright to everything on DM and CSB so you'd be better off developing unique graphics, sounds, etc.

[cowsmanaut]

well, there is no good reason as to why they would not release CSB except that they didn't think that it would survive the competition. A port really would have been hardly any trouble at all. Castle wolfenstien came out when? What else was hot then? I mean if you think about it the port would really only require that they port the maps and a few new images .. oh and the intro really most everything else had been done already during the port of DM.
..........
as for the Clone it will have some new GFX to pick from and the old will be ther too.
As for copyright well, I did say in the last post that it will be *FREE* as in we are not gettting paid for it. nor are we requesting money for it.
A lot of the work being done while it all looks the same it will be new.. new code, new GFX. Maybe some new sounds. The maps will be there still though it should support DMUTE dungeons that have been made as well.
Besides if they were worried they were being ripped off for money or whatever they would have already shut this site down for having DM and CSB for download.
The software is dead and is no longer supported except by the fan base.
It's not like were taking money out of their pockets if they're not selling it anymore anyways.
ahh well.. cheers. Drake

[Gambit37]

It doesn't make any difference whether you're intending to make your clone free or whether you'd charge for it. If you're using original materials from CSB then you're infringing copyright, plain and simple.
Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright laws exist for a reason. They are there to protect people who create an original work, whether or not that work is charged for is neither here nor there. Only created works explicitly assigned as Public Domain can be freely copied.
This is the problem with the mentality behind a lot of Mods for games like Half-Life. The mod designers think that just because they aren't making money from it, then they can rip off anything they like. That simply isn't the case. The law is there to protect the hard work generated by somebody else. How would you like it if you spent years creating something new from scratch, such as a film or game, only to discover somebody else ripping it off 6 months down the line without so much as asking for your permission?
I'm no lawyer - all I'm suggesting is that you might be better off generating your own materials for this project, unless you can get permission from FTL. Somehow, I doubt they'd actually be worried, but it always pays to be careful with these things. What would be the point of spending months developing this only for some FTL lawyer to chance upon the site and take you to the cleaners? Look at the number of Mods and TCs for Half-Life that ripped off popular films - many of those were closed down.
Just my 2 pence worth.

[twinfalls]

Here is an interesting legal issue. The point is to redo DM because the original is not available at all. Is a copyright forever ? Is there a "falls public" if not exploited for some time ? I sure agree that original work should not be ripped off. I am not a lawyer, I am twinfalls@netcourrier.com

[Gambit37]

To be protected by copyright law, then the work in question must be registered with the Copyright Office of the country in question. Each country has it's own laws regarding this.
However, copyright is INHERENT in anything that is created, whether or not the thing is registered. Clearly it will be difficult for someone who creates something and doesn't register it, to prove in court that they are the original creator.

Copyrighted material becomes public domain after a certian time after the death of the original author - something like 50 or 75 years later, unless it's re-registered by someone acting on behalf of the original creator.

[Ian Clark]

I am not 100% sure about the difference between the two but if it is a patent, I know for sure it runs out after 20 years so DM only has a couple of years left (think Dysan Vacuum Cleaners!)

[Zyx]

I often saw in abandonwares, that a game becomes of public domain after 5 years of no commercial explotation...

[+Seeker19]

That's true: abandonware is commonly considered software that is 5 years or more old. However, abandonware is also completely illegal, which is why dozens of abandonware sites get closed down every week.
About 3 years ago - by my reckoning, which is faulty - the abandonware idea really took hold and has captured the imaginations of computer users everywhere. At that time, somebody somewhere came up with the idea that 5 years was a good cut-off point, beyond which companies wouldn't care enough about their software (which by then would be terribly out-of-date) to take legal action. Unfortunately for them, many companies have not agreed with this idea and have taken legal action...though the abandonware movement may have had the positive effect of inclining certain games companies to release their older software titles as 'freeware', such as the first Krondor RPG, which was released for free last year.
Of course I don't know if this is a direct result of the abandonware movement, but such things weren't done until a few years ago.
Anyway, the idea of abandonware - software being freely distributable after 5 years - is completely false. Copyright lasts beyond the lifetime of the creator, which nowadays involves curious situations where companies may own copyright due to intellectual property agreements employees enter upon employment (even so, copyright would revert back to the actual creator(s) if a company were to go out of business). Patents, on the other hand, involve the rights to a process, not a work, and are protected for a period in the US of a minimum 17 years. Since DM was actually released in 1985, they'd still have a couple of years...except that patent doen't apply to software, copyright does.
Gah. I do go on.

[cowsmanaut]

Let us stop and think a moment.. what is it the is actually owned by FTL/Software heaven in the DM universe?
Is it the manner in which you move about the dungeon? No since games like Bloodwych and Captive wouldn't exist.
Is it the monsters? Mummy .. real life things been around longer than FTL Screamer .. look in AD&D Purple Worms .. again AD&D not sure about the colour though Black fire .. been around in legend for a very long time empty armour .. legend of the black night Blue meanies .. Uhm the Beatles movie giant spiders/wasps .. movies since the 50's or so flying snakes .. ancient legends and AD&D I can keep going but you get the idea..
Perhaps then it's the spells? Runes have been around since the moment man first tried to create a written language. Each of these spells could be done in any number of ways since all of them were thought up from legends and stories etc for the longest time.
so really all they can have under copyright really is the orriginal efforts they made.. the code that was written which we have re-written more or less from scratch. the recorded sounds which I can rerecord at any time and is nto a worry, the drawings of the monsters and specific visual revisions they have made like, the names of characters .. no big deal there either .. the runes they have made within a certain exception which is those that do not already exist in any language at the time they were created. so that would be.. (ful, des, kath, ros, dain, and sar) which I've not yet seen examples of in any research I've done. The storyline specifics as they story is somewhat of a cliche anyway and has been done may times in different ways.
(Sigh) people don't seem to notice when things have been 'borrowed' from other sources. It happens to be that many of the greatly loved games/stories/movies/musics are ones that have borrowed from legend and culture. However as a result they become very difficult to nail down as owned property.
so while there are a few things that they can claim as their own, there is a buttload of stuff they can't and concidering the method by which we are making this clone, we are removing those things one by one.
Compile that with the fact that the game is no longer being sold nor is it supported with revisions. Add to that that we are not making money from this. Add again the simple fact that these games can be found all over the place for free and tottally in your face public and no one is stopping them. (shrug) it just doesn't seem likely that were are to have any problems. They can't claim loss of income, nor can they claim defacement, and they can't claim theft since it's all been redone.
Besides, this is an effort in reviving a game to fans all over the web (most of which already own the game for some other computer system) in a 'labour of love'. If FTL came after us for this I would hope it would be to pick it up for distribution.
well, I hope this made some sence..
cheers

[Daniel Gustafsson]

No, it made no sence as for the copyright. It is illegal, why don't just admit that!
The clone copy graphics and sound from Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back, and FTL Games still holds the copyright for both games.
Copyrights lasts in many countries for around 75-100 years.

[cowsmanaut]

Ok here we go again...
Plain and simple here, I'm going to spell this out.
Dungeon Master includes in it materials that are taken from legends and cultures from all over the world. There is nothing new as to general content in the game. Therefore those things can not be copywritten.

What can be copy written is as follows.
1. The source code and binaries
2. Original Graphics (meaning those they themselves created)
3. Original sounds recorded by them
4. Names that are unique to the game itself
5. Complete and unchanged maps. If those are changed in sufficient fashion it is not a breach of copyright.

To simply put it.. It's very easy to release something that is obviously direct rip off without suffering legal action. People do it all the time.
Games like 'Eye of the Beholder' is more or less a rip off of DM.. Did they get sued? No they changed it enough to be legaly different.
If you look to the clone page you will see that I have in fact created new Graphics for the game. There is only a small sample there of what I have done.
The code is being rewritten from scratch. With new features added.
The sounds will be re-recorded to upgrade both quality and ambience.
As for the maps .. well, this engine will read the maps from the orriginal itself so if you have them you can use them we need not provide them with the binaries.
Same goes if you wish to use the orriginal Graphics. There is a Graphics.dat extracter that rips the GFX from the compression and places them, renamed for the game, in a new folder.
So you see it is not illegal what we are doing. Not untill we directly infringe on copyright. Which *I* don't intend on doing.
It's up to the others as to whether or not this project does cross the line.
The only true issue here is with the spells.. the symbols and sequence, which will require some thought.
Anyway, that's my say.

[+Seeker19]

1. Copyright has nothing whatever to do with whether an idea is original. Otherwise screenplays and the movies that result from them could not be copyrighted. So saying that there are cultural precedents that negate copyright is false. Copyright only checks other existing copyrights for validity/originality, and the covers the entirety of the copyrighted work, not just select portions of it. Therefore the idea of runes could only negate copyright if somewhere there was a druid who'd established copyright on runes...but that's unlikely to happen as it is an idea in the cultural lexicon. Similarly, copyright is often limited to certain geographical regions, which is why third world countries can manufacture copies of works copyrighted in other countries, such as the US and the EU, if those copyright holders do not expressly seek copyright in those countries. Further, *any* use of copyrighted material, whether for profit or not, can be considered to infringe that copyright. An example is Disney's various lawsuits of some years ago against teachers showing Disney films to their classrooms...that whole warning that comes at the start of every videocassette "For private viewing only..." relates to the copyright that the film's owner has on that work. That said, you can take a copyrighted material and adapt it so that it is substantially different - Eye of the Beholder was mentioned - and not infringe copyright, though people will generally recognize that you have imitated the original, if it is well enough known (as everyone did for "Eye of the Beholder"). Therefore it is unlikely that a recreation of the Dungeon Master game using a different engine with different maps, graphics, and names, as you suggest, would not be a problem, as long as you didn't refer to it as "Dungeon Master". Be that as it may, it is very unlikely that the copyright owners would take any action even if it did infringe copyright, since as far as I know they haven't cracked down on the free distribution of the PC version of their game nor on the emulation versions of the games, all of which are quite illegal.
2. I must say that I was terribly excited to find DMute as a utility for creating new dungeons, as that was one of two things that I'd always wanted to do in DM.
The other thing I always imagined was to be able to play multi-player. Any thoughts on adding a multi-player (even if just 2 player LAN) to your rewritten version of DM/CSB? There are, of course, some inherent problems with this idea (do the character graphics change with equipment changes? Does teleport kill?), but it provides some interesting opportunities...such as having each player play 1 character, or being able to present more puzzles like the one on Level 5 (never count the Hall of Champions) where the skeleton has to step on the pressure plate to open a wall...
Let us know. Despite any discussion of the nature of copyright, we're all very interested in your game efforts.

[Daniel Gustafsson]

Abandonware i just a word "old game sites" use so they feel a bit better when performing illegal activities.
It is still very illegal!

[Daniel (Sweden)]

I bought Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back from FTL Games last year.

[+dmman]

where did you buy dm and chaos from? via the net or some addy? thought ftl didn't sell dm and chaos anymore?

[cowsmanaut]

Culture can infact negate ones ability copyright an item. The only way around it is to create your own 'version' of it. Something to make it distinct. Otherwise someone would have gone out and placed copyright on the english alphabet or language, etc.. or hey why not copyright the Torah or the Bible? Copyright is something to protect one's creation.. if you clearly did not create it then why should you alone be able to use it?
There was a case way back about some Item that became so well known and used that any reference to something like it was done by using it's title. New products came out using the title of the orriginal and the company tried to sue but were turned down since the title had become a part of the english language. There had been nothing like it before and so the only word to describe it was the title of the very first one made. I can't remember the object in question as it has been nearly a year since I read about it but I think it was a household item of sorts.
Anyway, thanks for the positive comments on the project itself. If you care to learn about details that have been considered in the past drop by the board and read through the posts. There is a lot there and nothing has been finalised yet.

[Guest]

I bought it last year also. Have to go directly to FTL. Back then you could reach them at FTL.com. BUT, YOU CAN NOT GET THEM THERE NOW. It is "under construction" again.
I posted thier regular address way,way down on this board. In responce to someones request.
Sam