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Dungeon Master FM TOWNS on EBAY
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:30 pm
by dungeon.master
See
that incredible auction
seems in very nice state !
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:32 pm
by Gambit37
Been sold already

I would have bought it for that price too!
I've emailed the seller to see if he can deal in other DM Japanese games. These are the only ones that I need to add to my collection, but they are very hard to get hold of, and there are a lot of variations!
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:38 pm
by dungeon.master
Yes, it was sold less than four hours after the beginning of the auction.
In a former topic you said that it was pretty rare ?
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:41 pm
by Gambit37
Very much so, virtually impossible to get hold of outside Japan. That's a pretty good price for it in my opinion (well, a good price for anyone who wants to collect DM games anyway!)
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:57 pm
by dungeon.master
I have search if the seller gets CSB or DM II, but i didn't found them
i thought that you had DM FM TOWNS ?
What are you missing ? X68000 ? PC98 ?
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 10:24 pm
by Gambit37
No, I don't have any of the Japanese games except for Theron's Quest, DM2 for Sega CD and DM for Super Famicom (SNES).
These are the Japanese Games available:
Dungeon Master for Super Famicom
Dungeon Master for X68000
Dungeon Master for FM-Towns
Dungeon Master for PC-9801
Dungeon Master:Theron's Quest for PC Engine (Turbo Duo)
Chaos Strikes Back for X68000
Chaos Strikes Back FM-Towns
Chaos Strikes Back PC-9801
Skullkeep for PC-9801
Skullkeep for Mac
I also recall something Doug said about a Japanese Mac version of DM2, but not sure about this. Will need to check.
Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 11:10 pm
by Gambit37
Ah yes, found it:
Also, in looking through my DM stuff I noticed something you may not be aware of. There is a Japanese version of Skullkeep for the Mac. I think only a couple thousand of these were ever sold. The extra material and the boxes for the Japanese versions of Skullkeep are high quality and beautifully done.
Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 1:39 am
by ChristopheF
Gambit, in your list of Japanese versions, you forgot Dungeon Master II for PC-9821 which is another version distinct from the PC-9801 version. It has better graphics.
Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 1:45 am
by Gambit37
Oh, I didn't realise there was another one as well! Presumably it uses the 256 colour Mac/PC graphics as opposed to the low colour images from the Amiga/Sega CD versions. And there's me thinking I knew all possible alternate versions!

Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 2:14 am
by Gambit37
Looking through my old images, I discovered that there are different versions of the 9801 game too. For both DM and CSB there are at least two different boxes, with the following specs listed (I haven't yet looked into what these variations mean):
PC-9801 VX/RX/RS/RA (D0/VM21/VM11)
PC-9801 UX/EX/ES (CV/UV21/UV11)
The Skullkeep box spec is listed as
PC-9801/Epson PC
I know you have some images of these on your site. I found even more on the Japanese Yahoo Auction site. I even registered there and sent a babelfished query to a few sellers but never heard anything back -- it was probably pure gibberish!
I'm convinced that the only way I'm every gonna get these games is to actually go to Japan and search out all the retro games shops...
BTW, the Japanese are obsessed with metarials associated with games. As a result, there were dozens of hint books printed -- both official and unofficial - for all the platforms. There are even some graphic novels inspired by DM!:
http://page4.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d38040874
Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 1:36 pm
by Gambit37
Heh, maybe not so hard! I got a reply from the seller who can get some of these games! he's going to find out what he can get, and prices, and let me know.
I also spoke to someone at VGI who also thinks he can get the X68000 versions.
This is one of the (many) reasons why DM Codex hasn't gone on-line. I really wanted the first version of the site to feature ALL the versions of Dungeon Master.
Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 8:05 pm
by dungeon.master
Gambit37,
i found :
Dungeon Master X68000
but i don't understand a word

Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 8:13 pm
by Gambit37
Heh, that's the guy that I emailed -- he's the only one who says he can mail internationally. But I've never heard back from him -- I guess the babelfished translation I sent didn't make much sense!
Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 12:14 am
by ChristopheF
Did you also send your message in english? Most japanese people also speak english.
Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 12:46 am
by Gambit37
Yep, English too.... no response. Oh well, it doesn't matter as it looks like both the guy on eBay and VGI can get hold of some of these. Will have to wait a while to find out but it's looking positive.
Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 5:14 pm
by Gambit37
Woo hoo! This is the latest email I got from the Japanese seller who was on eBay:
Thanks for your quick reply,^^ I will get below softs. I'm still looking for other softs. I will answer you tomorrow in Japan time.^^ Thank you!(^-^)
Dungeon Master for X68000
Dungeon Master for PC-9801
Chaos Strikes Back PC-9801
My collection could be complete soon, you never know!
Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 10:31 pm
by dungeon.master
Great
for my part i'm on discussion with the seller of DM FM TOWNS.
maybe it could get something too
I hope your collection will grow in few days !
Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 12:05 am
by Gambit37
Do you mean davic_dream on yahoo.jp? Strange, I didn't hear anything back from him. If you mean the guy from eBay, Toshi, that's who I'm speaking to.
Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 10:21 am
by Guest
Dungeon Master for FM-Towns only cost me $12 shipped.

I guess the guy didn't know what he had.
Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 12:59 pm
by Gambit37
Oh, really? Where was that from? *Curious*

Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:24 pm
by dungeon.master
I paid 55$ for the game + 22$ for shipping.
the game has arrived in one week from Japan
Brand new
The CD ROM is not very well designed, i prefere the design of the music CD that is shown on DM Encyclopedia.
A problem : i made an ISO image , but it's only 4924 ko ? not 171MB !!
there is no sound when i played with the UNZ emulator.
Can someone tell me how i can get a full ISO image ?
I plan to buy a scanner, so i'll be able to scan the all stuff

Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:27 pm
by Gambit37
Hi. Who did you get it from? Toshi? Davic-dream? Someone else?
Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:30 pm
by Tom Hatfield
ISO doesn't generally contain music tracks. What software are you using to dump the image? Ideally you'll want to dump either to bin/cue or mdf/mds. Both formats support CDA. (As I recall, you can dump audio tracks with ISO, but the ISO file table doesn't support CDA. That's why you need a cue sheet.)
Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:34 pm
by dungeon.master
i used MAGIC ISO 4.1, i found it on a magazine CD ROM.
Please tell me what it's CDA ?
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 6:11 pm
by Gambit37
I gave some info to dungeon.master about searching for stuff of the Japanese site, but i thought others might also find it interesting:
Hello again
Originally, I used Babel Fish (
http://babelfish.altavista.com/) to translate the phrase "Dungeon Master" into Japanese. Then I type in the resulting Kanji into the search box on auctions.yahoo.jp. I didn't understand the results, but I could see lots of photos -- that's what got me interested.
Eventually, I took the time to copy and paste large blocks of text from the auction site to Babel Fish. The translation is far from accurate, but it gives you enough info to know what's going on. Plus I'd used other yahoo auction sites before, so it's easy to relate to the japanese one as the layout is very similar.
You need to have Japanese Font support installed in Windows for this to work properly. If you don't have it, you can do it from your Windows Setup CD, or from the Windows Update website.
Here's the Kanji for some phrases -- copy and paste these into the search box on auction.yahoo.jp to get Dungeon Master listings.
Dungeon Master:
ダンジョンマスター
Chaos Strikes Back:
カオスの逆襲
Theron's Quest:
セロンズ・クエスト
If you can't see Japanese writing above, then you definitely need to install the language support. Hope that helps.
Satoshi, my contact that I emailed through his eBay auction, is bidding on a whole bunch of stuff for me. Good job I did some work recently as this little lot is gonna cost quiiiiite a bit of cash..
To make a working ISO with Music, use CDRwin and create a BIN/CUE or ISO/CUE fileset. Works fine for me.
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 7:34 pm
by OpTiMaL
That was me that bought it for $12, I forgot to log in.
I bought it from a website that was clearing out all of their FM-Towns games. I didn't know if it was legit or not so I didn't even order it for about a year. Finally decided that it was only $6 (plus another $6 for shipping), so if it was bogus I would just take the small hit in the wallet. The place I believe is located in the US.
It came with all of the booklets and everything too. More than got my moneys worth.
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 10:08 pm
by dungeon.master
Merci, cher Gambit37

Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 11:04 pm
by dungeon.master
I have made a little journey to yahoo auctions on Japan : Wow
there is a lot of stuff !!
but as i seem to see, they don't sell out of Japan ?
thanks again Gambit37

Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2004 11:58 pm
by Gambit37
While searching for Dungeon Master stuff on Yahoo Japan, I came across someone selling a rather large collection of X68000 software. It's pretty impressive! :
http://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/65684384
Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 8:07 pm
by dungeon.master
Woooooooooooooooooooow !!!!!!!!!