Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

Yes! This is the infamous brain parasite adventure, created by legendary Dave Shelley (of Dave's Challenge and hardcore dungeon design in other Gold Box games). I know how frustrating and messed-up and downright scary this part was. I loved it, heh.

 

Yep. Characters will get infected and start attacking your own party. Much like Dopplegangers in the Bard's Tale games.

 

Finally beat Countdown to Doomsday, though I had to save scum to pull it off. When you fight some of the nastier combat robots in game it all comes down to who gets area of effect weapons launched first, and who can reload the fastest. I almost rage quit when trying to save the captured Martian lady from a RAM base. I had to fight four plasma/grenade launching robots at the same time. I'm still shocked that I pulled it off. The key to winning for me was to arm the weakest folks with the grenade and plasma weapons, since they rarely hit anyway, and give my warriors melee weapons and needlers.

In hindsight, I think you could play the game with four warriors and two medics instead of my party of two warriors, a rocket jock, an engineer, a medic, and a rogue. Because space combat is almost entirely optional and there aren't any other vehicles in game for your space jock, you really don't need a pilot. Rogue skills and engineering skills help, but better fighters and healing would have helped more. I'm not sure if I'll keep the same party for Matrix Cubed or if I'll convert to some heavier hitters. If combat is so heavily important in Matrix Cubed I may create a new party entirely with four warriors and a couple medics, or even five warriors and one medic.

This was not a very good game, mostly due to the repetitive and constant random encounters in many places, and the fact that you were given a lot of options that never seemed to be fully realized, such as never being able to upgrade your ship, purchase grenades and other helpful items so that I could actually spend my credits, and all the downtown social options that never seemed to go anywhere. It still had its moments of genius mixed with the bad, summed up in moments like this:


{Pic is not mine; pulled from a hilarious Let's Play: http://lparchive.org/Buck-Rogers-Countdown-to-Doomsday)

I'm glad I'm done with this.

 

Yeah, that was a nasty area. My own reaction:

"Seems it's not possible to do the optional Rendevouze mission on Juno without maxed out stats. At one point my party is surrounded by four combat and assault bots with Plasma Throwers and Rocket Launchers and if I'm lucky one of my guys can react before hell is unleashed.

With no in-combat healing (in Dark Queen of Krynn one Heal spell could turn a battle) and no way to increase STR, your stats and derived abilities (initiative, carrying capacity and movement, and HP) play a larger role in this game."

I think there will be more opportunities for the space jocks to use their skills in Matrix Cubed. Also, the use of grenade launchers and plasma throwers will be much more important, for which THAC0 is not that important.
Also, you are supposed to raid RAM ships in Doomsday, as part of the good fight and to raise more money.

I thought it was a pretty good game. Better than Gateway to Savage Frontier and about on par with Champions of Krynn (the weakest of the Krynn games IMO). The random encounters were annoying, but tolerable.
Did you tour the entire asteroid belt? That's where you find the best shops, IIRC.
Oh, and did you (try to) fight Talon ans his merry army of rogues and robots?

 

octavius , I did explore the asteroid belt and did every side quest there except for one where I was jumped by robots when walking into the door, and the Thule prison one. I decided against doing them since I was beginning to hate fighting robots.

I did take out about half a dozen RAM ships for their personnel equipment that I sold off and for fuel, but I never did find a decent shop. For instance, I went to Tycho but never found Lunar weapons and went to Venus but could never buy Venusian weapons. I only found basic mono swords and lasers, for instance, instead of Lunarian Mono Swords or Venusian Mono Swords. I don't know if I have a different version of the game, because my experiences with buying equipment doesn't seem to match what other people are saying.

One of my characters did have an awesome polearm, but I never trained her in melee weapons since there didn't seem to be a polearm expertise. Instead I maxed her out in Needler, as those weapons always hit despite chaff and aerosol grenades. I gave her a point in rocket pistol, since that seemed to be the best weapon until I found out robots were immune to them and chaff grenades stopped them.

Finally, I never did find the microwave and heat guns to be effective against humanoid or robot enemies. I got excited when I found some Mercurian versions of them, but couldn't damage anyone with them when testing them out.

 

Heat Guns could be effective against animal type monsters, IIRC.

As for the shops I don't recall the details, but I could swear the best shops (selling grenades) were on a couple of the asteroids.
IIRC (my memory sure it no longer what is used to be), on the stations around the inner planets and Luna, there are two areas you could explore. If you go "down town" you may find additional shops and fecilities. Maybe you didn't explore all the options?

 

Well, I loaded up Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed and the first few encounters my party had a bit of difficulty handling, especially because I never reload when a character gains a level and randomly generates a piss poor hit point upgrade upon training.

So I restarted with a new party of amazons... five desert runner warriors and one terran medic. I equipped them all with the old party's equipment and proceeded to absolutely destroy each of the next encounters during the first mission. It was awesome! But these six are nearly retards when it comes to not killing whatever is in front of them.

After completing the first mission, I had my ladies try to travel around in space. I encountered a heavy RAM cruiser, but because we lack a rocket jockey, hilarity ensued as we could not escape. Combat was still easy, and my crew didn't need a rocket jockey or engineer to keep the ship running while we took out the enemy weapons, then control systems. We boarded the ship and slaughtered everyone, even a bunch of high level RAM gennies in Martian Battle Armor w/ Shields, which we looted to outfit four of the six party members. They now have -6 to -7 Armor Class scores.

Flushed with victory, I went to spend some of the spoils on fuel at a nearby asteroid, but again because we lack a rocket jockey, we crashed into the port and spent our spoils and then some on repairing the dock so they would let us land. If this keeps up my party will be broke soon. So I can reload the old party again, and suck at tactical combat, or stay with my new party, and slowly watch my funds decrease as we crash into every port we visit.

 

I think I'm done with Matrix Cubed, which is a darn shame since I was having more of a blast with it then I did Countdown to Doomsday. This was mostly because I went with the five warrior women and one female medic configuration to make up my space amazon team. And each had a couple grenade launchers and a polearm with huge strength to carry all the gear. This party was a lot of fun. I even enjoyed the fact they couldn't succeed at anything that didn't require killing an opponent:












The last pic is where I finally got stuck. Even if I bring up members of my old party, no one has the programming skill. New characters can't seem to start with it. Looking at the game documentation, Programming is a special skill a character can learn once they pick up a skill called Mathematics. No character can start with Mathematics, either, and I am not sure where a character picks it up. Looking at an official cluebook I downloaded also doesn't help me figure out where I am supposed to learn the skill, but it does say that a high Programming skill is a requirement for this part of the game in order to continue. I'll also need another skill called Library Search that I also have no idea how to learn. I don't feel like continuing stumbling along while trying to figure out where to pick up these skills, then fight random encounters until I get a character to a high enough level where they have enough skill points to get me past this obstacle. I was playing this one a few hours a day, but this roadblock killed my momentum. Looks like I may be starting the Krynn series earlier than I thought.

 

Strange. I never played Matrix Cubed but aren't all those skills in Countdown to Doomsday? I remember putting points in them. In fact isn't programming the skill you use to fix a medbot in the very first "dungeon"?

 

Deuce Traveler, you need to hit the Next button when selecting skills to view all of them.

 

Yes, Programming and Library Search are Intelligence general skills available to all classes.

 

Oops, I see that now. The first page of general skills was such a short list on screen, and so I didn't pick up on there being further options. Thanks for the help, gents. Looks like we are finishing this one...

 

Gee, what could possibly go wrong with female drivers and female programmers?

 

Bros, sorry if this has been answered 7 times in ITT already but I can't be fucked reading it all.

I want to go back to yesteryear and replay the Krynn saga again. I downloaded Dosbox and roms of all these games. I load the game into Dosbox and it works fine, but when I try to save I get an error

UNEXPECTED ERROR DURING SAVE: 3HALI

Anyone know how to fix this shit?

 

The game can't find your save location, probably because the version you copied had already been played before and configured to a certain virtual C drive location. Check your program's .cfg file in the main game folder.

I'm playing Buck Rogers Matrix Cubed right now and it's config file is named matrix.cfg. When I open that file in notepad I get this:

V
T
M
C:\BUCK-R~2\SAVE\
C:\BUCK-R~1\BUCK-R~1\SAVE\
F

The two C drive entries are telling the program where to find the character and game save files for Matrix Cubed and for where I placed the save files for Countdown to Doomsday in order to import my characters to Matrix Cubed. Basically, you need to edit your .cfg file and you should be good to go.

 

Oh right! Okay so here is my KRYNN.cfg file

E
A
M
C:\krynn\SAVE\
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
So you only need two directories if you are importing characters? What if I want to import later can I always go back and change this file to whatever it needs to be?

 

Which Krynn game are you playing? If you are playing the first one, there is no character import function, so it's a non-factor.

Your Krynn program is looking for a save folder in C:\krynn\SAVE\ when you create your virtual drive through DOSBox.

I have my DOSBox program loaded on my real C drive root directory, so if you were to go into my computer and open the C drive under my computer you would see it as C:\Dosbox

I then put all my DOS games as subfolders under DOSBox. My Gateway to the Savage Frontier game is currently in C:\DOSBox\Gate on my real C drive and the save game subfolder is under C:\DOSBox\Gate\Save

My config file is looking for it in C:\Gate\Save

That is because when I run my own DOSBox I place my virtual drive as C:\Dosbox using the following commands when I run DOSBox and get the Z prompt:

Z:\> =====>First thing I see
Z:\>mount c c:\dosbox =====>I type in my mount command to make C:\dosbox my virtual C drive location
Z:\>c: =====>I switch from Z prompt to my c virtual drive
C:\>cd gate =====>Change directory to subfolder named gate
C:\gate> =====>This is what appears when I change to my gate directory
C:\gate>start =====> This runs the start.exe executable file, which should be the same executable name for each Gold Box game, including the Krynn games

If this still doesn't work, you might be able to have the game reset itself and ask you where you want to save your files if you delete your .cfg file. I believe deleting the .cfg file makes the program ask you a series of questions so it can recreate it.
Edit:
Also, my Buck Rogers config looks like this:

V
T
M
C:\BUCK-R~2\SAVE\
C:\BUCK-R~1\BUCK-R~1\SAVE\
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

I think the first three fields tell the program your sound settings, whether you are using a mouse input, and so on. The next field is the location of my C:\Dosbox\Buck-Rogers-Matrix-Cubed\Buck-Rogers-Matrix-Cubed\Save saved game subfolder in DOSBox and the fifth field is my C:\Dosbox\Buck-Rogers-Countdown-To-Doomsday\Save subfolder. I probably should have renamed them to C:\DOSbox\Buck1 and C:\DOSbox\Buck2 before I started up the games and configured my settings.

The fields with the zeros aren't used, but were placeholder fields in case they would have some use for them in later Gold Box games, I imagine.

I also get save errors when I try to create specially linked Desktop shortcuts in Windows using the instructions found here:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/DOSBoxShortcuts

Which is odd, because I have no similar save game problems with other DOS games. If you are using shortcuts, try typing the commands manually through the DOSBox interface instead.

 

Right, yeah I'm playing champions. Ok I will see if I can set up the directories right tomorrow thanks bro.

Update: okay so Dosbox is installed in the Program Files directory. File path is C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74\DOSBox.exe

So can I just have a /Games directory in there and then do something like

/Games/CoK/Save

then in the .cfg file I'd go

E
A
M
C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74\Games\CoK\Save
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

?? should work no ?

edit: going to uninstall and get it out of the program files directory

And that worked! Awesome.



Something not working still, I got it working FINE with DKoK, so my .cfg file for that game is:

E
P
N
C:\SAVE\ I know this is wrong
C:\DOSBox-0.74\Games\DKoK\SAVE
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

And this works fine, I can create and add characters. However my .cfg file for CoK is

E
A
M
C:\DOSBox-0.74\Games\CoK\SAVE
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
And I'm still getting the same error as before. I have the SAVE directory in there so I'm not sure what the issue is...

 

Weirdly I've noticed that DKoK has a KRYNN.cfg file and a DKK.cfg file (this one works). The KRYNN.cfg file is empty.

CoK just has a KRYNN.cfg file, which is the one I pasted above.

Just saw your line about deleting the cfg file, I'll try that.

 

Fuck that shit didn't work either, even though I explicitly set the save folder path when creating the config file at start up

 

For one, dos folder names are limited to 8 symbols. No "dosbox-0.74" for you.

Two, paths in .cfg should end with backslash.

C:\GAMES\GB\DKK\SAVE\ - works
C:\GAMES\GB\DKK\SAVE - doesn't

upd: just run COK without dosbox straight away, this config works fine:

E
A
M
C:\GAMES\GB\CHAMPION\SAVE\
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

 

If all else fails, play the Amiga versions.
Pros: Better graphics, sound and much better looking character icons in combat.
Cons: Much slower than DosBox since WinUAE emulates floppy disks and you need to swap disks sometimes, at least in Death Knights.

 

I originally played the Amiga versions back in the day so I'd prefer this. I'll try it out. Really don't know why DKoK works but CoK doesn't it makes no sense!

 

Yeah I changed the directory to DOSBox, I'll try the closing slash and see if that makes a difference.

 

I never could run DKK in UAE. Crashed to "guru meditation" screen after several seconds into opening battle. Tried that multiple times over the years with different versions of WinUAE and different disk images, no luck.

Some others behaved similarly, CAB I think. At least Pool works fine, and she needed graphical boost the most.