Sudden death,plague.. ?

[Vikis]

First I must say that this is a very nice site. I played DM (and DM II) around 89-90.. _several_ times on Amiga/Atari. One of my top 5 games, and I'v played alot :).

I remember that sometimes, all of a sudden, your party would die. No monster attack or damage taken, they all just died at same time. And I think it only happend on Atari version.

Perhaps it was when you stayed at a level too long..??

I remember that if the floppy drive started to read for a second or two (for no reason).. then you had to save because the "plague" would kill you in a couple of minutes.

[Andy]

I have only ever played the atari version and I have never come across the phenemenon you describe. I can only assume you are getting hit by rogue fireballs (perhaps level 7?) or are falling into a hidden pit of some kind (several levels) Where in the dungeon does this happen?????

[Vikis]

It could happend anywhere on any level.. I tell you it is not anything like fireballs or pits. When falling in to pits you see yourself falling, you also hear/notice spells.

When you die of the "plague", you don't notice anything. Just that death scream "AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrrrrghhhhhhh", even if your party was at full health. No damage inflict, just sudden death.

If the floppy drive started to read (as I described above), we could just stand at the same point and after about 5min..
"AAAaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhh".... the whole party dies.

If we ran up or down a level we wouldn't get killed, but staying on the same level would kill us.

[Sundeep Nandra]

That's weird...I've never had that happen to me on the ST or PC versions of Dungeon Master..........very strange.

[Demoniac]

I think that has happened to me once or twice. But I don't remember _when_ or _where_. Could it have been some kind of copy protection?

[Stetson]

I recognize that phenomena and I also remember that it only happened when running from copied disks, not the original. So most probably it had something to do with copy protection.

[Draken P]

Nothing like that happens with original versions. I played this game at least 3h/day and never did anything like that occur. You propably had a cracked version or something, because I always used a copy and kept the original in safe.

[Guybrush]

I fully recognize what you described ! What an anoying thing :/ I agree with the fact that it could be a copy protection because I only had this in DM copied and not in CSB original (I only played those 2, both Atari ST version).
For the reading sign before it comes I'm not sure... I always tought that meant monsters were coming :)

[lazygamer]

Damn that's one original form of copy protection.

[McNutz]

Yep, happened to me too, disk read + after a while, AARRGGHH..
I'm guessing its some sort of bug induced when some um, modifications were made to the binaries.