Dungeon Master Forum

hi there.
i never finished DM2 on my A1200 several years ago...
i reached the last floor of the tower, in a room full of big fireballs but couldn't move fast enough because of the -not so smooth- walk transitions. first, this was ugly because they stretched up sprites, and the most important, it was awfully SLOW !

now i try it in dosbox.. i guess most of you are playing this version, what cycles value do you use for best gameplay ? i tried several values but transitions are still very slow..

I'm afraid there is no help with this "feature". Though the smooth walking is nice and stuff, it really makes moving slow. But I liked it, maybe cos I never thought of speedracing DM 2.

Cast accelerate party (Wizard: oh ir ros). This eliminates the staggered movement (for a short time). If you have two or three characters, you can fit them with mithril hosen and achieve the same effect.

What room of fireballs are you talking about? Not the numen corridor, I hope. You can't speed your way through that unless you use a reflection spell. (I did that the first time because I hadn't yet figured out how to reach the last guardian. Took a few tries, but I made it!)

Or are you talking the reflector chamber? Or the Zo gate? Or the imp's lair? The latter is actually quite easy: keep an active fire shield (Priest: oh ful neta) and slaughter that little bugger as fast as you can.

I can't remember any other rooms full of fireballs. . . well, there is that one chamber off to the side of the great hall, after you meet your first chaos archers. A whole lot of dodging involved there. Same as with the imp: keep your fire shield up, cast accelerate party, maybe prepare a reflection spell or two (just in case), and move those keys like your life depends on it.

Sorry, I'm working on memory here.

To answer your last question, I run it in Virtual PC. There is no "cycles" setting; it runs as fast as your system will allow. I get a fair frame rate with four characters (much better with only one). Not as good as a genuine Win98 box, but it'll have to do.

I don't know what CPU you're using, but I've just started messing with DM2 in Dosbox. The transitions were slow when the cycles were set at 4,000, so I set them to 6,000 and this seems perfect. I'm running it on a Barton XP2500.

I might add I bought this game back in 1996, first game for my first PC (previously Amiga A1200 and A500 owner) and the sound never worked (I had an AWE32 soundcard, which worked fine in setup, but never the game, only could hear the midi). Now with Dosbox, 7 years later I can finally play it!!

Not read many posts yet, but I see many other people still feel DM is an absolute classic game. I'm currently playing through that at the moment, and am surprised it still holds the same atmosphere it did when I played it back in 1987 (only now I'm using WinUAE instead of a real Atari ST). In fact, there were still a couple of door which I was reluctant to open (and I'm 32 now ) Also, I see that I wasn't the only person to play it two player. I was always the person that got us around the dungeon and out of trouble. (which if the other player panicked as he sometimes did, occasionally resulted in instant death as a Mon Ful Ir spell went off whilst facing a wall)

I'll sign up to the boards properly as soon as I've created a pic to use

It's hard to remember what exactly someones question is without quoting them, but I will try

It ran slowish at 5000 cycles

I switched it to 10000 cycles and full screen. I don't know if it could be any faster. It's perfect

Im not sure if 10000 cycles is harmful or not but I played it for several hours today, and have noticed no ill-effects.

You might also try increasing DOSBox ramsize to 63MB in the config, I did this before ever playing the game so I don't know if its necessary.

If you are in the yellow, carrying too much, you will walk very slow and laggy.

hope this helps!

My computer is:
2666 Mhz Celeron D
9250 Radeon 256MB graphics card

You can quote people's message when it's relevant to the points you want to make. But a lot of people simply quote the entire message back and just add a single point underneath, and I find that unnecessary. It's a conversation when you reply directly to someone's message -- you wouldn't say everything back to them they had just said to you and *then* add your point in "real life" would you?

Why would you have difficulty remembering someone's post? If you use quick reply, it's right there on the page, and if you use the main reply with all the formatting options, the entire thread is displayed beneath your reply area.

we're just pedantic because the unneccessary quotes will obviously eat away at bandwidth and also there are still people on 56k modems to consider - thanks for sharing your working set up!

Oh! didn't see the messages at the bottom, thank you!

Bear with me everyone I'm a little new to online PC's, Except for some programing I've been using console game systems almost exclusively for 19 years

If the working setup info was helpful, I can also list any config settings that I changed, upon request. I got some of the info from here, and maybe some was just from experience of trying to get other games to run

Thanks for a great forum, I'll be here as long as I'm welcome.

you are very welcome, and glad you got to play DM 2 finally!

You guys make me wanna dig up my old PC DM2, install DosBox and give it a go or 2 !