adamantyr

February 8, 2021

7 hours ago, Brent Ellison said:

Did I just imagine that it was referred to as a pyramid somewhere? Or is there another pyramid??

There is no pyramid. I decided early on it was an overused trope of desert type kingdoms. I even thought about dropping a joke in the tavern about how stupid it is to build a tomb everyone can see.

February 7, 2021

35 minutes ago, Brent Ellison said:

OK, well maybe I'm misinterpreting what I'm seeing... not a big deal anyway.

BTW, I just (barely) made it through the pyramid - that place is some epic, Tomb of Horrors-level evil. Well done!

I presume you mean the Tomb of Umgazur.

February 7, 2021

1 hour ago, lerugray said:

Quest related question, I'm assuming I maybe missed

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something underneath the priory? Cleared out the dungeon exploring the whole thing I think, but when I check back at the town they still state that they are getting trouble from the bandits underneath the priory, was there something else that I was supposed to do there that I missed?

Spoiler

The ruined priory has bandits, but in the catacombs underneath you can find a secret entrance to a dungeon. I don't think there's any trigger change for defeating the bandits, they're just a nuisance to clear out.

February 7, 2021

5 hours ago, Brent Ellison said:

Running around in the Saguaro Gulch area and I think there's a refresh issue on health damage while walking around in the overworld. Walking through the cacti I don't immediately see my health go down, but when I go into combat suddenly everyone's health is lower.

Hmm I checked code and tried walking through a cacti patch myself, it seems to be working as intended. When I went to combat everyone's health seemed to align with what I could view in travel mode.

February 6, 2021

5 minutes ago, Brent Ellison said:

What's the mechanic for attempting to open locked doors after a failure? I failed to open this one door in the raiders' lair so I went and trained twice and equipped a thief trinket but still couldn't get it open... and after a few tries my pick broke. Is it like the old tabletop rule where you need to gain a level before trying again?

Yes, there's no randomness involved, you just have to have a high enough skill. Now checking on it, that door DOES have a rather inordinately high lock value, I think it got missed when I was refactoring them.

Try an unlock spell on it instead?

February 5, 2021

2 minutes ago, lerugray said:

So I think I may have gotten myself stuck on Osthaven given I don't have enough money to get back and im generally not strong enough to kill enemy mobs here, wondering if there is a hint im missing to recruit the warlock easily? otherwise I think I may have to restart unfortunately lol

The warlock will require a major quest item to rescue from her cell.

If you truly have no means to get money, a cheat below...

Spoiler

At the menu screen, before selecting "continue adventure" press Control and the number 3.

February 4, 2021

1 hour ago, lerugray said:

thats what it is then, thank you!

also one more thing, I apologize for all the questions! I've noticed this playthrough that my bard is constantly losing fatigue during combat if he moves or fires a ranged weapon, is this also intentional? This is not the case for the rogue in the party who has full fatigue regardless of his actions

As you can see in the picture, this bard started with full fatigue in combat, he hasn't used a single spell, but just by moving around and shooting a bow he is now out of fatigue while the rogue remains at full, if this is intentional I'm curious as to the mechanics, thanks!

EDIT: Just saw in the manual that characters take fatigue damage when using more APs than they have left (clever!) so I assume that must be it.

Yep, that's exactly right. Since you have five AP's and most actions cost two AP's, it's pretty easy to go over every turn.

February 4, 2021

2 hours ago, lerugray said:

Is one of those places including the moors where the hound hangs out? Also wondering about the plague town. I'll try it again later tonight once i finish dealing with bank stuff

Those should be fine to use it. Are you trying to use it in the inventory menu? You have to use it in travel mode.

February 3, 2021

3 hours ago, lerugray said:

So another question in game, where can one use a homing stone? Everywhere I've tried so far it says not usable here. Otherwise, I ended up restarting the game with just a rogue with the new update, so far have a bard in the party, thinking a warlock would be a good spellcaster then.

There's only a few places they can't be used. One is the iron mines in the deeper level because you can accidentally leave your boat behind and never be able to return.

February 3, 2021

12 minutes ago, Brent Ellison said:

Late to the party but I just wanted to say I have a Rogue and a Warlock in a 4-person group and with the way the spellbooks work I definitely wouldn't want to rely on only magic to cover the thief skills. Magic will cover the occasional case, but in particular for unlocking and secret door-finding the Rogue is far from redundant. Also, don't worry too much about starting affinities for spellcasters, they give you a small headstart but you can overcome them pretty quickly in my experience.

Might try the Hero path next if I decide to start over with v2... those companions are looking pretty juicy.

Just to be clear, you can make a 1-man party of any class, and have companions join you. It's not limited to the Hero.

January 31, 2021

Thank you for spreading the word!

January 31, 2021

There are eight potential companions, covering all classes except the Hero.

January 31, 2021

Generally the smaller the starting party the more the challenge is.

My brother as a play tester made a single party of a rogue, which was a definite challenge since he had to buy items for anything like light and healing to start with.

January 27, 2021

Yes, there was a bug in 007 and 008, you'll want 1.8.009 or you will have a freeze crash when poisoned.

January 25, 2021

I like Donkey Kong so much I'm musing writing a disassembler just to view the source code for it.

In particular, I'd like to see why on the elevator level there is the occasional "freak out" VDP crash, right when you're waiting to jump off an elevator. I wonder if there is a code stub for the spring boards (which aren't in game) that is disrupting things.

January 25, 2021

9 minutes ago, Brent Ellison said:

Oh yeah, I meant to ask - does the main version on arcade shopper not get updated with the latest version? I had a friend buy the game with a credit card yesterday and he still had the freeze-on-poison bug.

I sent it to him to put up for new purchases, it may not have gotten up over the weekend right away.

Does he need a link to the latest version, or were you able to provide that to him?

January 23, 2021

38 minutes ago, Brent Ellison said:

Even minor-er bug: There's an errant bookshelf outside the sheriff of Bleyloch's house:

Ugh... I snuck a fix for that into the latest build, but it won't take unless the game is started over.

Fortunately the book in question (which you can't reach out there) isn't plot critical. Here's what it says:

January 23, 2021

1 minute ago, fimbulvetr said:

What files need to be copied to backup save games?

SAV, SG0, SG1, SG2 and SG3

January 23, 2021

16 hours ago, Brent Ellison said:

Minor bug - I picked up the chalice from the temple of light as part of the thieves guild quest and it told me that I had permission from the priest to do so (which I did not remember getting). Then later when I talked to the priest he said I had stolen from them and shouldn't talk to him anymore.

Doh! Sounds like another case of my dyslexic bit checking being off. I'll get that fixed along with boat issues in the next build.

January 22, 2021

Just now, Ksarul said:

SAMS doesn't clear memory on boot (I don't think any TI memory card does, for that matter). The cards hold memory as long as they have power--and no, there is usually no battery, although if using Zeropower RAMS in a 4M board, they just might have a good battery and hold data even when the power is off. As the 2M Zeropower chips are generally used, the batteries are usually dead, but there will always be random exceptions out there.

So powering off the PEB box should clear the memory then. I already have a fix for the issue, just making sure unit data is cleared before a battle as well as after. There could be other errant data hanging around but it's definitely an edge case.

January 22, 2021

1 minute ago, GDMike said:

I actually rely on putting stuff in my SAMs memory and rebooting my console to run another assy program that can re read my data from my Sam's card. Nothing to do with the game, but just want to mention that,

What happens in SAMs, stays in SAMs.

I wondered if SAMS had a battery in it! I may have to adjust my loader to clear certain pages used for dynamic data then

January 22, 2021

Just now, fimbulvetr said:

Hardware. I didn't turn off the computer, just pushed the reset button on the FinalGrom.

Definitely some left over data then. It makes me wonder what variable didn't get cleared; I have routines in encounter set up to blank data for this very scenario, clearly I missed something! That one may be a challenge to hunt down, but I'll fix it if I find it.

The crash I can't say; lots of things on hardware can cause crashes. I'd say if you do have a crash, your best bet is to power the PE Box down and back on again to make sure the SAMS card is purged of data prior to restarting.

January 22, 2021

Just now, fimbulvetr said:

I gotta say it again, I really am enjoying this game a lot! I bought my SAMS card just so I could play it, and it was definitely worth it.

Two things happened today. The first was a lockup crash while fighting some bears. All the text at the bottom disappeared and the computer became unresponsive. Then I restarted and reloaded my last save game_, and went back to the area with the bears. In the battle screen it said there were two bears to fight, but there were 5 on the screen... 2 that I could fight, and 3 "ghost" bears that did nothing. I could walk through them, couldn't fight them, and when I beat the two bears they disappeared. The extra "ghost" bears appeared over three of my guys at the beginning, so at first it looked like only one of my party was there.

Hmmm that's very weird. That happened on hardware, or in emulation?

A major difference between hardware and the emulator is the emulator always zeroes out data on startup, but that's not necessarily true with hardware. It's possible some variables aren't being cleared before use and some data is creeping in.

January 20, 2021

Yeah, my cartridge frequently crashed (garbled video) on the elevator level too, always when I got to a certain place.

The Atarisoft version of Donkey Kong is very impressive for a TI game. It actually is a 16K ROM, so it has a page swap for additional data. I've been meaning to try and disassemble the contents at some point...

January 20, 2021

1 hour ago, jwild said:

I couldn't resist. I just had to order the physical edition even after buying the digital.

You aren't the first! And definitely get them now. Unless there is a huge demand I probably won't sell any more than I currently have materials for.

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