Dungeon Master Forum

I've played the ST, Amiga and PC versions way back in time, but thought I'd ask just to make sure. Is the Amiga (v3.6) port the best version of DM in terms of sound/graphics/etc.?

I'd have to go with "no" on that one... in honesty, I'd say the PC one is better. Unless I'm mistaken, they only had a 16 color(4-bit) palette in the atari and amiga versions... the PC version has 256 colors (8-bit). As for sound, I'd have to say that the PC version would also be better there, but I could be wrong.

If you just want to play DM1, CSB or DM2, then I'd have to go with the Dungeon-Master clone "Return to Chaos" (12.6mb). It comes with the 3 dungeons I mentioned.

A bit off base there Lord_Bones The Amiga version still used the 16 colour graphics of the ST version, but it ran in 32 colour mode and made use of the other 16 colours to allow better palette shifting for the lighting effects, and also allow a full colour cursor so that items held by the player were shown in full colour (in the ST version, items are fully cyan).

The PC version ran in 256 VGA mode, but it has no extra colours in use, not even in the crappy exit animation. It's still using only 16 colours and works the same as the Amiga version (it's based on the Amiga techniques, not ST code).

So they all basically have the same in-game graphics, only the Amiga and PC have better shading routines and the full colour cursor. Later versions of Amiga DM (3.6) have nice intro graphics, a map, etc and this arguably makes that version of the game the best looking overall IMHO.

Thanks for the info, Gambit. I gathered that there wouldn't be much to gain in going from 4-5 to 8 bit color, because of the fact that RTC uses the original graphics anyway (they just use 8 bits to store the color information instead of 4 or 5). Unless a fan "touches up" the old graphics, then they always look pretty ugly (compared to actually using all 640x480 pixels, instead of just being a 2/1 scaled up 320x240). And I sorta gathered I'd be a bit off...

As for DM 3.6 being better, I can't say I've seen that particular version... but, it sounds inviting.

I might not be the most experienced DM-gamer out there, having only completed the game about 4-5 times, but DM along with Sundog and Elite are probably my "Top 3 games of all time."

Owning a Mac now has made returning to DM a major problem. I cannot get csb to work on MacOS, so that turned out to be a dead end, and now I'm looking at an Amiga emulator to get me there. I don't think I've ever tried the 3.6 version, so having read about it I'm all pumped up in fact.

Lord_BoNes wrote:RTC uses the original graphics anyway (they just use 8 bits to store the color information instead of 4 or 5).

Nope, it uses 32 bits instead of 4 or 5.

another addition of V3.6 would be multiple languages (afair English, French, German)
Amiga version had improved throwing speed(you cannot run into your own projectiles - some like it, though! Those are Atari freaks )
Amiga version lets you drink from fountains, too. Warcry sound and Monster Movement Sound and open up doors with an item in the cursor works. couple of improvements there, imo.

I should make it clear that the 3.6 version of DM doesn't offer any new graphics in the game itself. They are still all the same (although 3.6 does I think have a different perspective from the original ST version with an extra far wall displayed)

The map I mentioned is the language selector that was added in 3.6, that's all.

Sophia wrote:

Lord_BoNes wrote:RTC uses the original graphics anyway (they just use 8 bits to store the color information instead of 4 or 5).

Nope, it uses 32 bits instead of 4 or 5.

My bad. I was meaning 8 bits per channel, but I typeded it all wrongy

Just checked outDM on an Amiga emulator on youtube...I hate to admit it but it does seem a slight improvement on the ST version. The most noticeable things are the sound and the coloured cursor.

Still, the guy who posted the video is a really terrible player, proving beyond doubt that Amiga people are just not very good at DM.

To cha nge the subject completely, your D&D character is being ripped apart by a beautifully rendered flesh coloured floating hand

oh_brother wrote:Still, the guy who posted the video is a really terrible player, proving beyond doubt that Amiga people are just not very good at DM.

That's some troll baiting right there! Ban him!

Nooooooooooo, you can't ban my player! Who can I torture after a hard day at work?

Trantor, duhh - ban him instead .

Honestly, I've never had any really big problems with Amiga-people. Actually, some of my best friends used to have Amiga.

My father had one when I was growing up (I'm only 26 after all)... it's how I learned of games like DM and Simcity.

Of course, personally, I'd never buy an Amiga or even advise someone to buy one. I've always admired people who actually purchased Amiga and tried to use it - it's an astonishing bravery requiring personal qualities I don't possess.

Jan wrote:...it's an astonishing bravery requiring personal qualities I don't possess.

LOL But, I must say that I'm personally thankful... I found Dungeon-Master!
But, I owned a C64 and Atari-ST myself... I fiddled around abit (it's what got me into programming), but I know what you mean by "bravery"
You had to be brave to program one of those machines! Especially seen as each one had its own variant of a given BASIC language...

We had an Atari ST when I was a child and I first played DM when I was 9 years old. After getting a PC later on, we kept the old Atari in the basement mainly for playing DM for a long time.

Always thought the ST was a great computer, it seemed better than the PC's of it's time.

Soaponarope wrote:We had an Atari ST when I was a child and I first played DM when I was 9 years old. After getting a PC later on, we kept the old Atari in the basement mainly for playing DM for a long time.

Always thought the ST was a great computer, it seemed better than the PC's of it's time.

I had both an ST and later on the Amiga as well, and the latter was noticeably better when it came to graphics, and out-of-this-planet-type better when it came to sound (not that the difference would be that great in DM though... ).

The ST had one major plus though, another phenomenal FTL game was released on the ST and not the Amiga: Sundog. I still think it's one of the best games of all time, an absolute classic.

I've downloaded the following file:
http://dmweb.free.fr/files/DM-Game-Amiga.rar

But extracting the RAR seems to cause errors all the time. I've even tried using an online extraction tool, and that failed too. Could somebody pls help!

The .rar file is fine. Try to download with another browser, there must have been an issue during download and your file is corrupted.

If it's not your browser, check that you're not using a download accelerator like "GetRight" or something... some accelerators don't like certain files or servers (because of using multiple connections, some servers allow the additional connections, but corrupt the outgoing data... which corrupts the whole download).
I personally know that the dmweb.free server works with multiple connections using "bitcomet" (because I use it without any issues) but I don't know about other accelerators.

Not sure what's going on, I've tried downloading it via both Firefox and Safari (I don't use any accelerators or other software), and each time I am unable to decompress the file.

I'm having no such trouble after downloading the PC version.

I've even tried an online decompression utility and inputted the URL instead of uploading the downloaded file, and it still won't work... not sure what else I can do...

On a side note, in the PC version why does the multilingual version just have dm.exe whereas the US version also has install.exe?

Are you having issues with other website/servers? If not, then perhaps you could ask someone to host it elsewhere... I'd do it myself, but I'm on limited bandwidth, so it's very difficult for me to help.

Maybe somebody could put the Amiga 3.6 version on: http://www.speedyshare.com/

Or maybe there's an unknown bug with "The Unarchiver" program for Macs?

I've put a copy of the archive in zip format (6 MB) (maybe your problem is because of wrong version of rar decompression?)

http://dmbuilder.sphenxmusics.fr/extern ... -Amiga.zip

Many thanks, was able to unpack the zip file without any issues.

One of the major advantages of the Amiga version of DM/CSB was a wall tapping ability (in early ST versions it wasn`t possible - I just can`t imagine playing with wall bumping every time). Gratefully, Paul Stevens added this (Amiga) feature to the code.