Phantasie series

[unseeingeye]

There's Hatari too, you can try that.

Thank you very much for sharing all of this information. I actually do have Hatari; it is what I was using before encountering the suggestions here to use Steem.

I actually was configuring all of my DOS games manually, and had a basic config that I would work off of for disk images and cue/iso files. I relearned a bunch of the prompt commands and would leave detailed instructions in a text document within each games folder for the names of the directories and the different launch options, &c. This was actually enjoyable for a while (similarly I enjoy building and adding to my game libraries for each computer) and I learned a lot, but once my library began to grow it got to a point where it was just impossible to maintain this effort and to keep in memory the different particulars for different games, so I ended up grabbing D-Fend Reloaded for the ease of use. But when I discovered eXoDOS it was like the clouds parted in the heavens and a gift of love rained down upon me; that collection is precisely what I needed, and it alleviates so much of the manual configuring and trial and error processes. In the relatively rare circumstance in which a game isn't configured optimally for me, I can spend the time figuring out what I need to do, but the majority of the games I've downloaded through it (that is the lite version) have readily launched and ran perfectly.

I still keep the manual setup I have on the internal SSD as distinct from my eXoDOS setup on an external one, since in general most of the games I'm interested in take up such little space and I like knowing that I have a guaranteed setup arranged to play certain games that require virtual mounting, but for the most part I just go with eXoDOS now. I will however download the Dosbox Staging and check it out, I'm always curious to discover developments to the emulators I like.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Besides a lot of videos on youtube look who I saw who had a blog on Amiga Emulation: Lilura 1: WinUAE Tutorial Guide - Installation

And if I didn't mention it I forgot the site had this: RPGCodex's Emulation Central

Yeah, I completely forgot how to run WinUAE. I must've muddled through it the last few times in the years past and just forgot as it was a terrible experience. Time to change that.

 

[Rincewind]

I will however download the Dosbox Staging and check it out, I'm always curious to discover developments to the emulators I like.

The current eXoDOS v5 uses the original DosBOX, but if I'm not mistaken it will be replaced eventually with Staging. The Dosbox Staging team seems to be working on a bunch of tickets to address the specific needs of the eXoDOS project.

 

[Rincewind]

Besides a lot of videos on youtube look who I saw who had a blog on Amiga Emulation: Lilura 1: WinUAE Tutorial Guide - Installation

You can say many things about Lilura, but she is an Amiga enthusiast, and the Neverwinter Night module reviews on her blog are quite informative.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I also can't find a phantasie mac image/dsk file.

As to spectrum... nice looking games on that list: http://zxds.raxoft.cz/games.html

Phantasie on the Spectrum is considerably less far-fetched than I gave it credit for. Some of those ports back are pretty ambitious. Lemmings? Wow...
And if Macintosh Garden doesn't say anything about a port, its very unlikely you'll find it somewhere.

What a find KeighnMcDeath! This page is *great*! I never owned a Spectrum myself (C64 was my first computer), but I love the Speccy aesthetics. Some of these games will definitely end up on my list. But see, now my problem is that as it grows bigger and bigger, it will take decades to complete... (admittedly, a good "problem" to have)

You're going to finish your backlog? I noticed it myself, but there are definitely enough interesting games in the 20th century to take a lifetime to finish.

Yeah, I completely forgot how to run WinUAE. I must've muddled through it the last few times in the years past and just forgot as it was a terrible experience. Time to change that.

I've seen Rusty praise FS-UAE for being easier to pick up and learn.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

It looks a bit difficult as well. I'll go through some walkthroughs and vids. I'll pop open lenny also. I'll get it eventually.

 

[Rincewind]

You're going to finish your backlog? I noticed it myself, but there are definitely enough interesting games in the 20th century to take a lifetime to finish.

Well, I'm in my early 40s, and my dad is still alive and well at 93. So going by that, I guess having a few good decades left is in the cards But only making the list is a lot of fun in itself, I learn a lot about the history of videogames just by doing that. So if I end up only trying out 50% of them and playing maybe 20%, I don't see compiling the list wasted effort at all.

 

[unseeingeye]

It looks a bit difficult as well. I'll go through some walkthroughs and vids. I'll pop open lenny also. I'll get it eventually.

Although I keep WinUAE on my laptop, I should echo what Morpheus Kitami has mentioned about FS-UAE being easier. I have my entire Amiga library currently setup within LaunchBox using FS-UAE as the default, and there is even a little custom program somebody made that will read your FS-UAE game folder and deposit into a folder of your choice all of the numeric ID strings for each game as categorized by the database on openretro, available here (you have to sign up to be able to acess the file, but it is free): https://forums.launchbox-app.com/to...a-folder-structure-for-import-into-launchbox/ which can then be imported into LaunchBox, so that LaunchBox will populate your Amiga library with custom configuration codes instead of actual game images, causing it to launch FS-UAE with all of the custom presets. It is amazing that somebody bothered to program such a helpful little tool.

The way FS-UAE makes Amiga emulation much easier than WinUAE is that most (but not all, at least not yet) Amiga games listed here: https://openretro.org/ are pre-configured by users with the optimal emulation settings, and it recognizes and runs by default WHDLoad files, so you don't have to do any of that yourself, effectively allowing you to bypass the process of learning which BIOS and kickstarts are required for each game, the memory settings, &c. People have already figured this out for the majority of games and continually are updating the database, so what FS-UAE allows you to do is to point it at your folder where your game images are (or you can even drag and drop the file right into the program), point it to the folder where your kickstarts are (these can be found here, among other places: http://amigas.ru/amiftp/index.php?dir=AmiFTP/Amiga Kickstart Roms - Complete - TOSEC v0.04/), point it to the folder where your BIOS aka Workbench files are (and this is the tricky part because FS-UAE needs very specific versions of certain BIOS to run certain games, which can be difficult to source as I had to ultimately find them across four different websites, then afterwards I found that in the very thread you've already linked, somebody uploaded a package containing every version FS-UAE requires which would have saved me so much effort; here is the link: https://www.mediafire.com/file/dk6lc22898qq20r/Amiga_Bios_Pack_FS-UAE.zip/file), and then the emulator will show green check marks next to each copy of the BIOS and kickstart ROMS it found on your computer, while the games list will populate with a little icon next to the games it recognizes that you have archives or images of (you can set the list to display both games you have installed and games that are in the database that have configurations already and will be highlighted if you add the requisite game file to the designated folder and rescan the it).

In short, the tedious and occult process of determining which BIOS and kickstart, which Amiga to emulate, the cycles, the memory, and all of the other many variables requisite in playing the many awesome Amiga games has already been arranged for everybody, and FS-UAE (which is a user-friendly fork of WinUAE) will, granted access to the database, establish all of this for you. You provide the game files, the BIOS files and the Kickstart files, and it does the rest. The easiest file format for Amiga games in my experience is the single archive WHDLoad games, which have for an extension suffix "lha". Rather than having to use multiple disk images and establish configurations within WinUAE to pre-load multiple disks and swap them as necessary (which I used to do), the single file lha formats are recognized by FS-UAE and you literally just download them, put them in a folder, scan that folder within FS-UAE and you're done, the game is ready to play. This is where I get almost all of my Amiga games, and all except one single game has worked perfectly: https://www.whdownload.com/

The only game that proved difficult was Fate: Gates of Dawn, but there is an excellent (and comprehensive, because it includes an Atari ST version as well, plus English manual) pre-configured version of that game available for download that mondblut hooked me up with that is still available from his post even though he is banned (hopefully he can return soon!). Setting up FS-UAE was actually one of the easier emulators to figure out for me, especially compared to WinUAE which did take me some time to become adept at. If you're like me and like having all of your games neatly organized within one massive but neat and customizable front end, FS-UAE and your Amiga game library is also simple to integrate into LaunchBox, which I became familiar with through eXoDOS. I now have my entire Amiga, Commodore 64, Atari ST, DOS, and Windows game libraries integrated within LaunchBox and can simply click on over 8000 games for either system once and be playing it. It is really an amazing tool and I am going to purchase the full version because I'd like to support its development, which is ongoing still. But that is absolutely not necessary, all of the essential features are available in the free version.

 

[mondblut]

I haven't had that problem, using Win 7 and playing in a window.
Have you tried Alt-Tab'ing back and forth to capture the mouse cursor?

Nah, that has nothing to do with mouse capture, it's just that the cursor becomes invisible, and its speed unpredictable (but it is still there somewhere). More than once it happened when I tried to save the game in town, once it took me about 15 minutes to press the 6 "shares" buttons with an invisible cursor. Worst of all, this condition is saved with memory savestate, so you can get royally fucked.

Now that I finished the first two during my time in the Codex limbo, let's hope Phantasie 3 doesn't suffer from this problem. Or maybe it's my emulator version which is like 20 years old.

 

[Rincewind]

Now that I finished the first two during my time in the Codex limbo

That was quick!

 

[Rincewind]

the tedious and occult process of determining which BIOS and kickstart, which Amiga to emulate, the cycles, the memory, and all of the other many variables

I'm glad you found something that's working for you with the least amount of pain. However, I'd like to point out that the complexity of setting up WinUAE is a bit over-mystified. Yes, it's possible to screw up royally because there are so many options (it can emulate virtually all Amiga hardware in existence), and you can easily come up with nonsensical configs if you don't know what you're doing that just cannot possibly work at all. But in reality you only need configurations for two machines, A500 and A1200, and you never need to touch those again on a per-game basis*, that's just wrong. After all, the goal of WHDLoad is to be able to play the whole Amiga catalog on real hardware (A1200 being the main target), and you cannot "change the hardware configuration" on a per game basis.

So, with this out of the way, WinUAE provides defaults for all common Amiga models. You can just start with the A500 and A1200 models with the "Best Compatibility" presets and tweak it further from there.

For A500 you use the "1.3 ROM, OCS, 512 KB Chip + 512 KB Slow RAM (most common)" preset. 99% of all existing floppy games will just work, there's zero need to tweak anything whatsoever. A500 emulation in WinUAE is virtually flawless, it's absolute perfection. This is the setup that most Amiga gamers (including myself) had back in the day.

When A1200 was released, a quite large percentage of existing A500 games just didn't work on that new machine anymore. That's due to the different Kickstart ROM ("BIOS") version, different and not 100% backwards compatible CPU, different graphics chipset, and so on. So yeah, the "difficult to configure" myth is most likely coming from that fact. But that is why WHDLoad was invented, so that people could play all those old A500 games on their new A1200 from their hard-disks (A1200s came with optional HDDs, and most people had one). WHDLoad takes all the different ROM version requirements out of the equation (it loads the required ROM version per game into memory, provided you have enough), and all almost WHDLoad installers contain patches that change the game binaries to make them compatible with the new CPU and graphics chipset.

So, for A1200 you'll need to use the A1200 "Basis non-expanded configuration" from the quickstart, turn off "24-bit addressing" in the CPU settings, then upgrade the RAM settings to 128 MB Z3 Fast RAM (in reality probably 16 MB would be enough, though; a few games don't start with 8 MB only or load much slower because there's less memory caching).

*There's a single thing you might need to tweak quite rarely on a per-game basis: if you see some graphics artifacts, you can try turning off the two "cycle-exact" checkboxes under chipset, and check "Immediate Blitter". But that's the only thing, really.


Setting up harddrives and Workbench for an A1200 WHDLoad setup is a different matter, that's covered quite well in the Lilura blogpost in a previous post. But this is all there is to configuring the hardware part correctly, for once and all.


EDIT: Why would you even want to use A500 with floppy images once you have an A1200 + WHDLoad setup? Well, some WHDLoad conversions are just buggy, unfortunately, in which case you might need to play the floppy originals on an A500 (with 800% floppy speed, which usually works fine). Or you might want to play the original uncracked version of a game from the SPS collection -- you'll need an A500 for that as well.

 

[unseeingeye]

For A500 you use the "1.3 ROM, OCS, 512 KB Chip + 512 KB Slow RAM (most common)" preset. 99% of all existing floppy games will just work, there's zero need to tweak anything whatsoever. A500 emulation in WinUAE is virtually flawless, it's absolute perfection. This is the setup that most Amiga gamers (including myself) had back in the day.

This is what I'd argued on another thread here just a few days ago, in fact. I was convinced that I was arguing out of ignorance and simplifying something I do not fully understand, given the impression that I encountered dumb luck and would quickly run into major issues I wouldn't be able to resolve without unnecessary effort.

EDIT: Why would you even want to use A500 with floppy images once you have an A1200 + WHDLoad setup? Well, some WHDLoad conversions are just buggy, unfortunately, in which case you might need to play the floppy originals on an A500 (with 800% floppy speed, which usually works fine). Or you might want to play the original uncracked version of a game from the SPS collection -- you'll need an A500 for that as well.

My only explanation here is because not all games have WHDLoad conversions; at least I haven't had luck in sourcing some of them if so (admittedly this is rare). But your post is greatly informative and explained a lot of what I was confounding for myself. I didn't grew up using an Amiga and have never even gotten to touch one in real life, so it has only been through emulation for me and that only recently. Previously it was something I'd only admired from afar since childhood. Evidently I'd consumed the notion that the emulation process is an arcane mystery involving convoluted minutiae and allowed it to color my experience, but in fact I only ever had trouble running a single game through WinUAE and even that did eventually work out, I just ended up replacing it with a superior version. Thank you for taking the time to clarify the broad picture here for me; like I said I still maintain an install of WinUAE and apparently already had figured out, for the most part, what I was doing, so I will continue to use both. The integration support for FS-UAE into LaunchBox is the main deciding factor for me here, but I do like the WinUAE interface and acknowledge that I even enjoy the configuring where necessary.

 

[Rincewind]

Dudez! Look what I found!

https://www.forum64.de/index.php?th...for-sd2iec-device/&postID=1492103#post1492103

Ok. Here are clean copies of all three Phantasie games. Clean meaning that they were imaged from my original disks and that there is no saved characters, previously visited dungeons, or quests completed. Its as fresh as the day the games were first opened from their packaging back in the day. LOL

You need to register on the forum to be able to download. Incidentally, only the 8-bit versions are the "true" versions of the game; as I posted a few days ago things got messed up during the 16-bit conversion and the combat became too easy.

EDIT: From the same forum, some helpful German dude created a D81 version of the games (D64 images are 170k, while D81 are 800k, which means no disk swapping in this case). You must use True Drive Emulation in VICE and no fastloaders, though, otherwise it won't work.

P1-2
https://www.forum64.de/index.php?th...for-sd2iec-device/&postID=1503630#post1503630

P3
https://www.forum64.de/index.php?th...for-sd2iec-device/&postID=1703555#post1703555

 

[unseeingeye]

Nice, Rincewind! Thank you very much for the link, I'll sign up and grab it while it is available.

I still haven't managed to stick to a game so far this weekend, I made the mistake of discovering the archives of every game ever made for MSX, PC Engine, every Commodore, every Atari, every Nintendo, Sega &c computer on console and have been grabbing BIOS files, emulators and integrating them into LaunchBox. I need help, lol.

EDIT - No-Intro Romsets (2021) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

 

[unseeingeye]

I noticed that link has clean copies of Elvira II and Keys to Maramon (Magic Candle related), nice! I grabbed them, too. I'm not familiar enough with the C64 to actually engage in conversation there but I am immensely grateful.

 

[Rincewind]

I noticed that link has clean copies of Elvira II and Keys to Maramon (Magic Candle related), nice! I grabbed them, too. I'm not familiar enough with the C64 to actually engage in conversation there but I am immensely grateful.

Yeah, I grabbed those too myself! :D

 

[octavius]

You need to register on the forum to be able to download. Incidentally, only the 8-bit versions are the "true" versions of the game; as I posted a few days ago things got messed up during the 16-bit conversion and the combat became too easy.

P3 also? I seem to recall it was brutal on both Amiga (which I completed) and ST (only played a bit, but was burnt out after P1-2) versions.

 

[newtmonkey]

Phantasie (Apple II)

I am heroes of Gelnor!!

Fantastic game, especially for 1985! I enjoyed it from beginning to end.

I felt the difficulty was perfect all throughout. The only time combat became braindead easy was when I had to backtrack once to a previous dungeon. Otherwise, enemies continued to put up a good fight until the very end.

The final dungeon was not bad, but I ended up having to return to town four or five times to fully explore it. The fixed encounters were not so difficult, but the random encounters with HIGH DEVILS were brutal. Confusion 4 is not guaranteed to stick, and their spells can do absolutely insane damage.

In contrast, the BLACK LORD went down surprisingly quick. I was able to get Confusion 4 to stick at the end of the first round, so that made things a lot easier from the second round on. Even with all the buffs I could cast in effect, I could only barely scratch him with melee attacks, so it came down to Fireflash IV.

---

Anyway, awesome game. It's hard to believe it was released back in 1985. Combat is great and wilderness exploration is a ton of fun. The dungeons, however, are definitely the high point. Every single one was a joy to explore.

 

[Rincewind]

You need to register on the forum to be able to download. Incidentally, only the 8-bit versions are the "true" versions of the game; as I posted a few days ago things got messed up during the 16-bit conversion and the combat became too easy.

P3 also? I seem to recall it was brutal on both Amiga (which I completed) and ST (only played a bit, but was burnt out after P1-2) versions.

Actually, the thread where I found this info was about PIII only; the guy compared the Amiga version to the C64:

Playing through the C64 version of the #1 RPG of all time I noticed that High Devils sometimes had wolves on rank 2, something that never happens in other versions.

After analyzing the monsinfo.dat file High Devil did indeed have a reference to Wolf at rank 2. But the Wolf structure itself was corrupt, listing a Wolfs hit points as 0. Using data from the C64 version I could recreate the correct info for wolf so now the wolves are back from the dead.

As for your question, the monsinfo.dat for Amiga, Atari and PC (named CREATURE.DAT) versions are exactly the same, ie no wolves since that piece of data is corrupt. The C64 version has Wolf intact and also differs in the byte that describes which picture to use for each monster, a bit different system in use I guess.

Another thing I noticed while playing the C64 version was that it was much harder to hit monsters. This could be because the byte that decides how hard a monster is to hit seems to be calculated as a signed byte on the Amiga. That is, 127 is the highest value, values beyond that get calculated as negative, ie easy to hit.

So, based on this, some monsters present in the C64 version are missing from all 16-bit versions, plus the hit chance calculations are cut in half on the Amiga, making everything much easier to hit. If the Atari ST and the Amiga versions shared the same engine code, they had the same bug. And most likely they did as they had the same Motorola 68000 CPU, so the standard practice for Amiga and Atari ST ports was to use the exact same assembly code for the game logic, then they just rewrote the I/O, sound and graphics routines for each platform.

Similarly, Apple II and the C64 have the same MOS 6502 CPU, so most likely the game engine shared the same code.

For PI and PII, the other guy from the C64 forum linked above who converted the D64 images to D81 format found out that both PI and PII on the C64 were written in some compiled BASIC language, and the two games essentialy share the same engine code. So most likely Westwood who did the 16-bit ports rewrote the whole thing from scratch, most likely is assembly. But I don't have information whether those are faithful ports of the original 8-bit games or not.

Phew... Researching the differences between the different ports of these old games gets really complicated...

 

[octavius]

Well, I think I'll push through with my Atari ST playthrough and see if P3 was as difficult as I remember.
And in seven years time when I get the Phantasie itch again, I'll try one of the 8 bit versions.

 

[octavius]

ST version of P2 seems to be even easier than P1. Orcs used to hit and do 1 damage, now they can't even hit my lvl 1 characters.
OTOH I already lost two party members to "an Imp" which turned out to be "3 Implings" when I attacked.

EDIT: And I lost my wizard to a trapped oracle. What bullshit.

So overall more difficult.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I noticed that link has clean copies of Elvira II and Keys to Maramon (Magic Candle related), nice! I grabbed them, too. I'm not familiar enough with the C64 to actually engage in conversation there but I am immensely grateful.

Uh...what's going on with the C64 version of Elvira II that one needs a clean copy for?
Also, the no intro MSX collection is missing quite a bit, but most of it is in Japanese, so I doubt you'll miss it too much.

 

[Rincewind]

Uh...what's going on with the C64 version of Elvira II that one needs a clean copy for?

Not quite, in that thread some guy was creating 1581 (D81, 800k) single-floppy versions of multi-disk 1541 (D64, 170k) games. So those Elvira II and Keys to Maramon versions were just that. Given that there's a risk that these conversions introduce bugs, and it's quite easy to flip disks in VICE, I'm not quite sure it's worth the risk for a minor convenience.

It's just that they hunted down the uncracked original disk images for the Phantasie I-III conversions that don't have the maps already explored, so I thought that was worth sharing.

 

[Fluent]

I'm still taking it very slowly, playing about an hour every other day, heh. That's because I tend to play several games at once, so I have to give time to all of them. Anywho, not going to repeat that the game is great, but it really does lend itself to a productive and fun hour of gaming. I was able to level up my Wizard (the previous one or two died at level 1, the horror.) And also get close to another level for my Monk. My Kobold Thief is ready to level up but for 1350 gold, which I have, I just have to scrape together a bit more so it's not 100% of the gold I own. Looking good though. I am about ready to head to the 3rd map in the game, unless I head back to the Cathedral in map 2 to pick a lock as the previously mentioned Thief will have leveled up (we tried but couldn't pick it before.) Fun stuff! Hope u guys are still having a blast with it. I realize I've got a longggg way to go, and I'm pretty happy and content with that. Cheers!

 

[unseeingeye]

Uh...what's going on with the C64 version of Elvira II that one needs a clean copy for?
Also, the no intro MSX collection is missing quite a bit, but most of it is in Japanese, so I doubt you'll miss it too much.

I figured there was a reason, but I'm totally new to C64 emulation so I wouldn't know why. I'm learning as I go and grabbed them with the intention to look into them later, but if its unnecessary or introduces bugs I'll just use the multi-disk versions of those games I'd already downloaded.

And yes you're certainly right about the MSX collection, I went way overboard with my "every game ever made" talk in my excitement, I just didn't know such collections existed and was amazed to discover them. I used to mess with emulators back in the early 00's, stuff like Snes9x and a few others, but I never got very involved and hadn't looked into the progress made over the past two decades, so encountering the astonishing wealth of available collections and emulators has been a recent interest of mine. I was able to supplement some missing MSX games, but as you mentioned they are mostly in Japanese so I haven't made it a priority to try sourcing a comprehensive collection. So far I've got game libraries for a bunch of computers and multiple consoles all integrated in LaunchBox and working, and some have been easier than others to set up. I struggled the most with Apple IIGS integration, but I finally figured it out.

Having most of the computers that have games I'm interested in up and running is so rewarding and I am thoroughly enjoying the learning processes for each one, and there are a few others I do have an interest in but likely won't get around to any time soon, if at all. For instance FM Towns, Sharp X68000, and PC-9801 are computers I'd like to be able to explore, even with the language barrier, but I'm still basically a novice in this area.