Dungeon Master Forum

This started by some bug fixes for the linux version, but since Paul doesn't want to maintain the sources anymore for now, I added mingw compatibility to have only 1 source tree for windows and linux thanks to sdl which is multi platform.

You have the major changes listed at the bottom of the readme at this address: https://github.com/zelurker/csb
And I am hosting a mingw version if you want to test it in windows here, it includes the dungeon.dat & graphics.dat for dungeon master and 2 mp3 to show how the custom sounds work for war cry and the horn of fear.
One of the most obvious changes is that the window is resizable and you can toggle fullscreen using alt-return.
The mingw version : http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb ... 250430.zip

I'd like to eventually add some panning to the sounds to locate them in space but for now everything is mono, like on a good old st ! (but the mixer is opened at with the parameters your hardware prefers, which are usually something like 44 KHz stereo 16 bits).

And here is already 20250503 (removed the old archive) : mainly added lots of sounds for walking monsters, with panning and attenuation with the distance. Walls are ignored for the sounds, so you'll hear what there is behind the walls as if there was no wall at all, which can be fun sometimes !
Notice though that the sound attenuation is proportional to 1/square of the distance, which means you don't hear very far at all. I don't bother with sounds where attenuation becomes < 1/10, so it's barely more than 3 squares away.
A few monsters are still missing because they are are harder to pinpoint in the code. Thanks to Christophe for the sounds in the encyclopedia, the mp3 are taken directly from there without modification except for the filenames. They were moved in a sounds directory because there's quite a lot of sounds inside now.
Except that some bug fixes, but nothing major.
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb ... 250503.zip

Sounds exciting and thank you for tackling this.

Just wondering if you have already considered moving on from SDL2 to SDL3 (or adding direct SDL3 support). I wonder because distributions have already started to move on from SDL2 to SDL3, and if one uses a distribution that has SDL3, it may be difficult to build the source.

Well for now I admit I am too lazy to just learn the new tricks in sdl3, maybe later but not now. Anyway the situation is not as bad as for the switch from sdl1.2 to sdl2, they have made a sdl2-compat package which is supposed to give full compatibility with sdl2 programs when using sdl3. I didn't test it here because I prefered to have a full sdl2 installation instead (using arch we can still compile sdl2 from aur), but normally it should work.

Since there is no way to edit a post, here is a new post for the 32 bit version for those who are interested, I just received an email from a japanese guy stuck with vista 32 bits on a laptop and he would need a 32 bit version. Not sure sdl2 will be fully compatible with vista though, but it's worth a try.
So here is the 32 bit version, it would be 20250504 too since I managed to put a few more fixes inside last night :
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb32.7z

Ok, I won't post a new binary everyday, but I met Shu online today and from our exchanges a few more bugs were fixed, so...
- limit sounds of moving monsters to 1 level above or below, previously there was no limit at all! Found by Shu 1st, but I was starting to suspect something too... !
- Sounds for levitating monsters Couatl and wasp. And for non levitating Trolin
- fix color conversion for RGB565, this one was found by Shu, white was not white enough for him and he was right! Colors are brighter now.
- a better underflow test for the sound, still experimenting...
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb32.7z for the 32 bit version
and http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb-20250504.7z for the 64 bit one, as always, previous archive was removed.

And the daily binary, it should be the last for a while because the sound part seems finished for now :
- added the last missing sounds for moving monsters : pain rat and ruster. And fixed vexirks which are actually levitating so it makes their sound called from another place.
- fixed the sound for the prison gates opened at the very beginning of the game ! These are handled differently from the other sounds, see the info from Christophe there : http://dmweb.free.fr/community/document ... es/#data-6 precisely normal samples are at 5486 Hz, but the prison doors are at 4237 Hz ! I confirm it sounds much like what dungeon master on an emulated atari st sounds like !
- Punctuation fixes, some people seem attached to some "!" and some "." at the end of some sentences, there was a topic on the forum about that, and Shu is among these... oh well, if it can make them happy... (and apparently it does !).
- Walking sounds limited to current level only, apparently that's what ftl did for the amiga version, so... !

And so that should be the end of this part about sounds for now. Ah I have reverted the default sample rate to 5200 instead of 5486 but you shouldn't hear a difference anyway.
Binaries :
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb-20250505.7z for the 64 bits
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb32.7z for the 32 bits

The 64 bits link is broken

Back to a super slow forum already... Yeah it's http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb ... 250505.zip and not 7z, sorry.

And a bonus for today because of the report from Christophe :
- resizing the window is now immediate, and it works even in the 1st screen with the 4 buttons before the dungeon
- restoring an iconified window works in linux
- build date inserted in windows's title so you can check quickly I didn't make any mistake when updating the binary on the site
Still the same urls, about 3 posts above I think.

There is a serious freeze bug reported by Shu and Christophe, I can't reproduce it in my windows 11 setup. Apparently the game freezes for them if the mouse doesn't move inside the window, just stop the mouse and everything stops. Since I can't reproduce it, it's a hard one, but if some have or haven't got it, you can post with what windows configuration you have (unlikely it would happen in linux !).

edit : and finally the freeze bug on some machines which was related to a thread problem is fixed in today's build. That will be the only fix for today, it required 5 test builds I'd say it's enough for today!
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb ... 250506.zip
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb32.7z

Since this forum is sadly half dead, got only 1 reply except the one from Christophe in all that time, I won't keep on posting every day, not more than once/week now, except in case of an astounding bug!

So here is the update for this week in chronological order since the fix for the freeze bug :
- Added a new application icon from Shu, might be a little dark when it's too reduced...
- Fixed taking an object on the floor : you had to click on the lower part of an object on the floor to be able to take it which could be very irritating at times because it's counter intuitive. It's now fixed, this bug has been in CSBwin for a very long time!
- Add 3 custom sounds for the 3 missing attack sounds which were added in the amiga version. These are the sounds for the couatl, the rock pile, and the water elemental. As usual they are from the encyclopedia, in mp3 without any modification and thanks again to Christophe for these.
- fix ending sequence for dungeon master ! You got only the 2 1st sentences, and very slowly, the 2 last ones were lost. Now it's fixed, the timing is slightly faster, and the text is translatable, so I updated the french translation file with a translation for it.

The 64 bits version becomes csb64.7z, which allows me to only update the exe inside when uploading a new binary.
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb32.7z for the 32 bits one.
http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/csb/csb64.7z for the 64 bits version.
See you next week-end!

This is awesome, so I hope you don't think your work is going unappreciated. Niche by today's standards, but not unappreciated.

I've been on these forums since 2005 or so, on and off (mostly disappearing for years at a time lol)

Thanks for this, these are great contributions to the community.

To be honest I think most dungeon crawler fans exist at dungeoncrawlers.org these days, and most updates and communication seem to be in the official Discord. This kind of contribution would be absolutely appreciated there, but please keep posting it here too.

No problem thanks!
Most of the ideas are exchanged by mail between mainly Shu (from Japan, but in english) and me at the moment. There are still good things to come!
I might take a look later at dungeoncrawlers.org but for now I am a little busy with this... !
Also too bad for me that I didn't discover this site earlier, missed 20 years of this, but can't do anything about it. At least I try to do my part now!
I found it because I updated my old emulated files for atari and I had the idea to use a search engine to check if someone had the idea to try to make some improvements to dungeon master... Very good idea even if it comes a little late!