Dungeon Master Forum

Hiya!

Over the weekend, on the 31st anniversary of the release of Dungeon Master, I put out a video on Dungeon Master! I do detailed videos talking about old games, and was glad to be able to talk about one of my favorites. I included a look at various bugs, all of the versions of the game, the sequels and spinoffs and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzAMcSaMRy8

Cool, might check it out at some point - don't have time right now as the vid is over an hour long and I'm going out in a bit.

I've watched the first 20 mins so far: great stuff! I love the level of detail you've gone in to. I'm looking forward to watching the rest when I have a bit more time. Nice work

I've now watched the whole thing. Amazing amount of work you put into this, and to finish on Ethnicolor, one of my favourite early Jarre tunes, well, icing on the cake. Congrats!

And thank you for mentioning this forum. I'm no longer an admin here, but spent more than 15 years here as a moderator and admin, and it's nice to get a link back to the forum that acknowledges this little community. Between us, we certainly kept the memories of DM alive much longer than I think anyone might have expected...

Thank you for sitting through the whole thing, Gambit! And yeah, good lord that took a lot of work. Just putting the video together took ~40-60h. Put my life on hold for a week to launch it in time for Dec 15th.

The intro, sections, subsection titles and outro are based on the computer the game is on. This is on the Atari ST, so I picked the most iconic song, to me anyway, on the ST: the Captain Blood theme. I only just recently found Ethnicolor itself, and it quickly became one of my favorites. Anyways, that odd cut of Ethnicolor was actually the intro music to the game Captain Blood, a very strange and incredibly difficult adventure game. The song fit it well.

Still, even with the research I've done, I keep worrying I've made mistakes, like I think when I said "Bugs from CSB Win", they're actually from Christophe Fontanel's ReDMCSB... *sighs*. Going to see if I can add a comment to that through YouTube so I don't have to rebuild the whole video.

I think those bugs listed as "CSB Win" are fine. CSB Win is based on the original disassembled source, as is ReDMCSB, so the bugs refer to both the original games AND the re-made versions based on those sources. Given the close relationship between these versions, I personally wouldn't worry about making the distinction, at least, don't worry about re-cutting the video just for that.

I never did play Captain Blood but remember someone saying about Ethnicolor being its theme tune. The only Exxos game I played was Kult, and that was pretty strange too!

Well, if Paul and Christophe don't mind the mistake. *shrugs*

In the late 80s and 90s, there was a phrase known as WTF, which both meant what you think it means and "Weird Thing from France". I think it holds quite true for a lot of their games. I also played Drakkhen on ST which was a pretty strange 4 character party RPG. Might have to check out Kult sometime, cause weird things are generally entertaining for a while. =)~

Very impressive work in this video. Congrats!

The minor mistakes I noticed about me but don't really care about so you may or may not fix them, it's up to you:
- at 38:44: Paul actually made the first reverse engineering work for a single version: CSB 2.0 for Atari ST, creating CSBwin that later evolved with many additional features. This was a foundational work that I built upon when years later I translated all other Atari ST versions and later all other versions (ReDMCSB, work still in progress).
- at 1:24:26: a typo in my first name, Cristophe instead of Christophe

Really cool video! You mention the disk copy protection in the original game, one thing that didn't dawn on me until 20 years later is that the magic system actually acts as a soft copy protection too. Because unless you have the manual, you have no idea what the scrolls says, and you'll have to trial and error every needed spell - starting with the light spell as soon as you step into the real game from the Hall of champions. And unless you have the manual, you have probably no idea that the first rune indicate the strength of the spell.

Zolaerla wrote:Drakkhen on ST which was a pretty strange

It was pretty strange on the Nintendo Entertainment System, too.
But I did succeed in winning the game.

The mistakes? No problem for me. Anyone interested enough to understand
what you are saying probably is aware of these things already.

Man, Christophe, I'm sorry! I freakin' triple checked on your last name (I kept trying to make you into a Fonatel for whatever reason) and totally messed up on the first name! My last name's Ormston, which gets mangled all the time, so I try not to. Blarg. At least that's the credits sequence and I should be able to fix it up pretty easily in the next couple of days.

Thank you for watching! I'm glad it isn't too long for people to watch and enjoy.