Phantasie series

[octavius]

Fuck it! No matter what I do I end up starting with lvl 1 characters.

 

[octavius]

This is freaking weird...reading CRPG Addict's blog I see that I commented about P3 nearly 11 years ago, and that I completed the Amiga version of P3. I had completely forgotten that; I thought I skipped it since I already played it back in the 1980s.

 

[Rincewind]

This is freaking weird...reading CRPG Addict's blog I see that I commented about P3 nearly 11 years ago, and that I completed the Amiga version of P3. I had completely forgotten that; I thought I skipped it since I already played it back in the 1980s.

Glad I'm not the only one with these kind of memory problems at 42...

What's more interesting is that when I need to re-research something (because I completely forgot I had already done it years ago), then later I find my old notes, usually I discover that I have reached the exact same conclusions and went down pretty much the same mental path again. Eerie! The universe is quite deterministic, after all.

 

[mediocrepoet]

This is freaking weird...reading CRPG Addict's blog I see that I commented about P3 nearly 11 years ago, and that I completed the Amiga version of P3. I had completely forgotten that; I thought I skipped it since I already played it back in the 1980s.

Glad I'm not the only one with these kind of memory problems at 42...

What's more interesting is that when I need to re-research something (because I completely forgot I had already done it years ago), then later I find my old notes, usually I discover that I have reached the exact same conclusions and went down pretty much the same mental path again. Eerie! The universe is quite deterministic, after all.

I hate playing partway through something and then realizing I've done it already and then spoiling the entire rest of the game out of half memories. Either that or buying something that I don't have "for the collection" and then realizing I have it in one or more formats on various accounts or shelves.

 

[newtmonkey]

Hmm...I suspect the first two areas being already explored is by design, like it's the party's own turf.
But quite impressive with a fan patch as recent as 2004.

I happened to be reading through some old CGWs and have found what I guess is the answer, as the reviews specifically mention the "out of box" experience for each game:

Phantasie I: Only the first outdoor map is visible from the start
Phantasie II: "Most" outdoor maps are visible from the start
Phantasie III: All outdoor maps are visible from the start

 

[octavius]

In III the outdoors have little practical purpose. With no exploration and early access to the Transportation there's really no need to travel much on the overland, except trips back and forth bewteen a town and a dungeon.

 

[Lucas]

Hey,

I'm currently playing Phantasie I, and btw, thank you Octavious for pointing out, a few pages back, about the fact that, on the Atari ST version (the one I'm using) monsters only do 1 point of damage, at least in the first couple dungeons.
Back in the day, I only played the 2nd and 3rd game (again on the ST), and could swear enemies were far more deadly :D . I thought my emulated copy was severly hacked or something

And yeah, Phantasie hasn't lost any of its charm: dungeons are still more interesting and fun than 99% of nowadays AAA games.

 

[Harlin]

"Monsters only do 1 point of damage" also depends on which version you're playing.

I thought this was a bug at first, but it's clearly intentional. The PC version specifically reduces the unmodified melee damage monsters do by a third, which the Apple ][ version doesn't do. (No idea about other platforms.)

That's before the reduction from armor kicks in: that's a simple subtraction of (armor value + Protection spell modifier), with a minimum of 1 damage. That's all there is -- the monster spell that says "the party's armor is reduced" actually is a Weakness spell. So it's easy in the PC version to get monsters doing just 1 point of damage with melee attacks for much of the game. You just need enough Strength to equip halfway decent armor, actually find and equip the armor, and you're set except against spellcasters and high-level monsters.

 

[Rincewind]

The Apple II and C64 versions came first. Those 8-bit machines used the same MOS 6502 CPU, so probably the game logic was ported over from one to the other unaltered. So I'd say that's the "definitive" version.

It's been documented for the Amiga and Atari ST ports (which happen to use the same Motorola 68000 CPU) that whoever did the 8-bit to 16-bit conversions screwed up a few things with the calculations (check out my earlier posts in this thread for further info).

The PC is again a different 16-bit architecture; the game was likely ported to the PC by yet another team (hopefully from the original 8-bit versions, but who knows...), so either it has its own share of bugs, or the guys who ported it took some liberties with the rules perhaps?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I still wonder about the japanese computer versions. I should have stayed focused.

 

[Harlin]

The Apple II and C64 versions came first. Those 8-bit machines used the same MOS 6502 CPU, so probably the game logic was ported over from one to the other unaltered. So I'd say that's the "definitive" version.

It's been documented for the Amiga and Atari ST ports (which happen to use the same Motorola 68000 CPU) that whoever did the 8-bit to 16-bit conversions screwed up a few things with the calculations (check out my earlier posts in this thread for further info).

The PC is again a different 16-bit architecture; the game was likely ported to the PC by yet another team (hopefully from the original 8-bit versions, but who knows...), so either it has its own share of bugs, or the guys who ported it took some liberties with the rules perhaps?

Do the other 16-bit platforms have the introduced changes/bugs from the PC versions that the Apple ][ doesn't have?

• Rolling for stats is highly biased towards very low and very high values. This wouldn't be hard to fix -- it's clearly deliberate, and also clearly stupid -- the PC version just rolls 1d20 for stats that are normally 3 to 18. (The Apple ][ has a clever 3d6 mechanism where the dice are loaded in your favor.) Very low-stats characters are hilariously unplayable, very high-stats characters wreck balance, and they're both much easier to roll in the PC version. I want to write a bugfix for this even though this change was deliberate.
• Random encounters in dungeons are far more common than they ought to be in the PC version. This is clearly a bug.
• Random encounters in dungeons are far easier than they ought to be in the PC version. You are supposed to get thematic monsters similar to the fixed encounters. This is also clearly a bug.

The PC version can also occasionally throw a high-level monster at you in a low-level outdoors area. I had thought this was a feature, but it's clearly actually a bug, so I'm planning to fix that.

I'm also planning to fix the PC version RNG -- it's crude and slow even by mid-1980s standards. (If you're playing at near authentic speed, that's actually what's causing a lot of the slowdown. I can't fix large monster animation, that will be slow no matter what I do.)

The PC version is in compiled C -- it's not written directly in assembly. I'm not sure what compiler, it's a strange looking one even by 1990s standards, never mind 2021 standards. SSI clearly actually wrote their own RNG and write-pixel-to-screen functions, too. (Well, the former was probably actually a good idea in C before about the late 1990s -- the standard C library RNG was notoriously bad even by the standards of awful RNGs. It just wasn't done that well here -- it looks like SSI grabbed some 1970s FORTRAN book.)

Do people think I should revert the PC damage adjustment too, even though that's also clearly deliberate?

I can post the relevant assembly code for any game mechanic if people are interested.

 

[Rincewind]

The Apple II and C64 versions came first. Those 8-bit machines used the same MOS 6502 CPU, so probably the game logic was ported over from one to the other unaltered. So I'd say that's the "definitive" version.

It's been documented for the Amiga and Atari ST ports (which happen to use the same Motorola 68000 CPU) that whoever did the 8-bit to 16-bit conversions screwed up a few things with the calculations (check out my earlier posts in this thread for further info).

The PC is again a different 16-bit architecture; the game was likely ported to the PC by yet another team (hopefully from the original 8-bit versions, but who knows...), so either it has its own share of bugs, or the guys who ported it took some liberties with the rules perhaps?

Do the other 16-bit platforms have the introduced changes/bugs from the PC versions that the Apple ][ doesn't have?

• Rolling for stats is highly biased towards very low and very high values. This wouldn't be hard to fix -- it's clearly deliberate, and also clearly stupid -- the PC version just rolls 1d20 for stats that are normally 3 to 18. (The Apple ][ has a clever 3d6 mechanism where the dice are loaded in your favor.) Very low-stats characters are hilariously unplayable, very high-stats characters wreck balance, and they're both much easier to roll in the PC version. I want to write a bugfix for this even though this change was deliberate.
• Random encounters in dungeons are far more common than they ought to be in the PC version. This is clearly a bug.
• Random encounters in dungeons are far easier than they ought to be in the PC version. You are supposed to get thematic monsters similar to the fixed encounters. This is also clearly a bug.

The PC version can also occasionally throw a high-level monster at you in a low-level outdoors area. I had thought this was a feature, but it's clearly actually a bug, so I'm planning to fix that.

I'm also planning to fix the PC version RNG -- it's crude and slow even by mid-1980s standards. (If you're playing at near authentic speed, that's actually what's causing a lot of the slowdown. I can't fix large monster animation, that will be slow no matter what I do.)

The PC version is in compiled C -- it's not written directly in assembly. I'm not sure what compiler, it's a strange looking one even by 1990s standards, never mind 2021 standards. SSI clearly actually wrote their own RNG and write-pixel-to-screen functions, too. (Well, the former was probably actually a good idea in C before about the late 1990s -- the standard C library RNG was notoriously bad even by the standards of awful RNGs. It just wasn't done that well here -- it looks like SSI grabbed some 1970s FORTRAN book.)

Do people think I should revert the PC damage adjustment too, even though that's also clearly deliberate?

I can post the relevant assembly code for any game mechanic if people are interested.

If you're spending time and effort creating patches why not fix the porting mistakes in the Amiga or Atari ST versions instead, so they have identical mechanics to the 8-bit originals? I mean, the DOS port is the worst of the bunch, I would personally rather play the C64 version than that.

 

[Harlin]

I'd have to learn an entirely new architecture for that -- that's far more time-consuming. This is much less work.

 

[Rincewind]

I'd have to learn an entirely new architecture for that -- that's far more time-consuming. This is much less work.

Yeah, that was my guess, and it makes sense (I'm also an x86 guy, never coded in assembly on the 68k).

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I love the c64 version. I wish the max xp obtained per trip was fixed. It is pretty shitty it is capped at like 65K.

 

[Harlin]

I mentioned above that armor works by (armor value + Protection spell value). If you are Parrying, also add the point value of your shield, but only once per combat round. You can therefore block up to 41 points of damage (11 points for God Armor, 10 points from Protection IV buff, 20 points from God Shield) once per combat round, and 21 points thereafter.

I'm also going to list things I want to fix, because I don't have it all in one place yet:

• The current RNG isn't a good one and is slow. (Technical detail: it's a linear congruential generator with a = 125, c = 0, m = 2796203, which at least does throw away lower-order bits properly like many programmers back then failed to do. The problem with this is that dividing by an integer greater than 65536, that isn't a power of 2, on a 16-bit processor is glacially slow. Passable on 32-bit mainframes back then, but not on a 16-bit home computer. Changing this to be a = 64389, c = 1, m = 4294967296 should both be faster and be a better RNG. A xorshift RNG would be even better; it's possible to write on a 16-bit computer but it'd be much more work. PC only, don't know enough about Apple ][ to look at that.)
• The RNG isn't seeded properly; this is why the game often doesn't act quite random when you start the game up. (Technical detail: the game uses the number of centiseconds on the clock and calls the RNG that many times. The clock on a PC back then was only accurate to ~5 cs at most. This also causes perceptible slowdown whenever you enter a town. Fix to use whoie system clock, once only -- this will still be vulnerable to clock attacks, but it's hard to defend against a modern attacker on DOS anyway. PC only, don't know enough about Apple ][ to look at that.)
• The game doesn't correctly tell you the number of experience points needed to reach level 2 for a brand new character. (Both Apple ][ and PC. The way the game does the calculation, it's making the assumption that you are level 0 if you have 0 XP -- what it actually tells you is how much XP is needed to reach level 1, which you already are.)
• The way the game rolls starting stats is absurd, rolling 1d20 instead of 3d6-with-loaded-dice. (PC only.)
• When calculating average party level, the game can only tolerate up to 15. Elementals and undead are level 20 and may cause strange errors if that pushes average party level to 16 or higher. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• When the game picks an item to sell out in a shop, it never picks MAGIC 10 because of an off-by-one error. (PC only.)
  
• There are 45 items that can be randomly placed in shops -- this is level-dependent. However, only the first 15 ever appear. (PC only; can be more than 15 if the level averaging bug above also happens.)
• Aging bug #1: if you add a character in town, he always ages 4 fortnights (the fortnight is the base unit of age for your characters); this should only happen if the character isn't in the same town. (PC only.)
• Aging bug #2: outdoor travel ages your characters twice as fast as should happen. This happens because the game converts days to fortnights by dividing by 7; the division should be by 14. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Sprites have a shorter lifespan than apparently intended. (PC only -- comparison with Apple ][ calculation.)
• Magical armor requires more Strength than the manual suggests. (PC only.)
• The mystic's score calculation doesn't quite work right. (Both Apple ][ and PC. On the latter it's definitely a "whoops forgot to initialize variables to 0" bug.)
• Anyone other than Fighters get fewer spells than they ought to, especially if they are Monks or Rangers. (PC only -- comparison with Apple ][ calculation.)
• There's no reason to limit characters to 255 hit points. Hard to fix on the 8-bit Apple ][, but I don't see a reason not to change this to 999 on the 16-bit PC. Only Fighters and Rangers can easily break the 255 cap, which helps game balance anyway.
• Casting Transportation forces you to redistribute gold and removes any elemental from your party. This isn't necessary and exacerbates the autosave bug. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Swimming 10 miles in the ocean is faster than walking 10 miles on grassland, somehow. You can swim faster than the best Olympic swimmers while wearing heavy armor. You can't get random encounters in water, either, so that's another advantage to swimming everywhere you can; I can make swimming take much longer. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Appleton should be a town on the map, not an inn. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Inns have a chance to increase maximum MP even when it shouldn't; there's an off-by-one-error in the percentage roll. (PC only. It makes more a difference than it sounds, because sometimes character resistance rolls are made against maximum MP.)
• Pools don't give you enough stats if you have 13 Luck. You should get +2 for 8-10 Luck; +3 for 11-12; +4 for 13. There's a rounding error in the way the PC version does math with 13 Luck. (PC only.)
• The bridge near Northford has a fight with WARRIOR (#57). If you make a table of monsters (they're in tiers of 12 monsters each), you can see that the game has a concept of a trollish monster, except there's a off-by-one error here; this should be TROLL (#56). Bridges are expected to have trolls, right? (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Outdoors fixed combats (like that bridge combat) don't set up combat surprise properly. (PC only.)
• A random outdoors encounter where the monsters hear the party, but the party doesn't hear the monsters, causes the monsters to try to surprise the party. If that fails, this should result in a standardized outdoors combat, but instead starts a combat using an invalid value for the first monster. (PC only. The invalid value will always be 1-49 so it will result in a valid-looking combat, but this is what causes outdoors combats in low-level areas to sometimes be dangerous.)
• Any Healing spell sometimes has no effect. (Apple ][ only.)
• The Binding and Weakness spells have each other's effect. (Apple ][ only. You can actually see the mild hack made to fix this in the PC assembly code.)
• Sleep only cancels monsters' action for the current turn; it doesn't actually put monsters to sleep. (PC only.)
• Mindblast and Flamebolt don't quite do their full damage. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Player Mindblast spells are irresistible. (PC only -- PC monster Mindblast, Apple ][ Mindblast, and Phantasie III Mindblast all do properly allow resistance.)
• Monster friendliness is not properly reset after battle. (Apple ][ only.)
• Monsters should get an attack bonus against sleeping characters. (PC only.)
• There are some places where the Apple ][ version calculates 2 ^ X. The PC version changes these to X ^ 2. X is always 0 to 4 so this actually doesn't have too much of an effect, but I'm inclined to change the PC calculation to the Apple ][ calculation anyway.
• The monster Sleep spell might say that it put a dead character to sleep. (PC only. At least it doesn't raise the character from the dead.)
• The monster spell that "reduces party armor" actually has the effect of the Weakness spell. (Both Apple ][ and PC. Will probably fix the text, since your characters don't have an armor-reducing spell either.)
• That same "reduces party armor" or "weakness" spell also has a randomized magnitude on PC. That doesn't happen on Apple ][ and it's sort of contrary to what the manual suggests, probably will fix.
• Monster melee damage is reduced by 1/3 on the PC version compared to the Apple ][. This is deliberate, but I don't see the reason for this; this makes it too easy to reduce melee damage done to 1.
• SAPPHIRE C and SAPPHIRE D are reversed. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• The Priest monster can cast Quickness II, but the way monster Quickness spells work, this actually weakens them. (Both Apple ][ and PC, probably will fix by changing to Quickness III.)
• Fire Elementals probably shouldn't be carrying around random scrolls. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
• Higher-level dungeon traps are actually easier to evade. (Apple ][, haven't looked at PC.)
• Dungeon random encounters are too frequent. (PC only. They're supposed to be common at first and decline dramatically in frequency during a single visit, but that decline doesn't happen on PC.)
• Dungeon random encounters should be similar to dungeon fixed encounters. (PC only.)
• If the monsters are demoralized enough to try to run away, it wakes them up. (Both Apple ][ and PC. Miiight be a feature, not a bug.)
• The calculation for checking if monsters successfully flee checks terrain -- even in a dungeon, where it shouldn't happen. (PC only.)
• The chance that you find an item after combat is 1% too high. (PC only.)
• Maybe I can fix the 655,360 XP cap per expedition. (PC only, would be tough, but that limit is annoying isn't it?)
• The PC fully supports lower case, I can convert most of the SCREAMING there to lowercase.

I haven't analyzed placed dungeon events on the PC yet (either in general, or in any specific dungeon).

Probably not going to fix because they'd be complicated:

• There's no exit to DOS. That part is easy; the hard part is reversing the strange memory allocation. (PC only.)
• Autosave corruption bug: yeah, autosave can corrupt your saved game. I might yet figure out an easy way to fix this, but I don't see one, and in the meantime I can just tell people to not use autosave. (PC only.)
• The game doesn't handle the clock rollover at midnight gracefully. (PC only. Don't start your game just before midnight, that can screw up the calculation the game does when it calculates your computer's speed. The game can also freeze during combat at midnight, but you can break that particular lock just by pressing any key.)
• Monster Evaluation has strange effects when cast on some special outdoor squares. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)

I don't think this is actually that many bugs, incidentally. It's about what you can expect when you deeply analyze pretty much any game.

 

[Rincewind]

Wow, how many hours have you sunk into this? It's a pity you're most familiar with the PC architecture; it would be great to create an "ultimate" Atari ST version (because that has all 3 parts of the trilogy). I've skimmed through the list and it seems like the 8-bit originals have also their own fair share of bugs, then there are the porting bugs on top of those, plus the "questionable" changes.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

A good dos version would be fine with updated graphics. I really don't care for some of the changes in 3 & 4. 1-2 hit a sweet spot (but qol changes are always nice since the originals exist).

 

[Harlin]

Wow, how many hours have you sunk into this? It's a pity you're most familiar with the PC architecture; it would be great to create an "ultimate" Atari ST version (because that has all 3 parts of the trilogy). I've skimmed through the list and it seems like the 8-bit originals have also their own fair share of bugs, then there are the porting bugs on top of those, plus the "questionable" changes.

A large amount of time (50+ hours), but a lot of that was spent just learning assembly language in-depth, which I didn't understand that well before -- I'm doing this partly as a self-education exercise.

I picked Phantasie I because I know it well and it's relatively straightfoward. There's good documentation, so a lot of game mechanics are already known.

Or so I thought.

It turns out it isn't actually that simple. There's a depth to game mechanics that no other non-SSI game this old has, a lot of which the manual doesn't even hint at; it uses floating-point arithmetic; and the executable uses overlays unconventionally (this is too long ago for there to have been conventions for that).

It wouldn't have been hard to get the code segment below 65536 bytes; there's a lot of code that never executes. Apparently, Phantasie I PC was designed to have PC speaker music similar to the PC Bard's Tale I or II, but that didn't make it to the finished project. That does give me an advantage trying to fix bugs, I have plenty of space in all that unused code. Something like Might and Magic I has a much simpler structure, but I wouldn't have much space at all to fix any bugs I find.

 

[Rincewind]

Harlin: Like KeighnMcDeath suggested, you could take x86 game engine you reversed, apply the bugfixes, and embed it into a modern app that handles the gfx & sound (but the game logic would just run the old emulated code). Something similar to what this fine gentleman did with Deathlord:

https://github.com/hasseily/Deathlord-Relorded

Well, it would be a lot of work... But it would be cool to have the ultimate bugfixed edition with Atari ST graphics for all 3 games. AFAIK, P2 uses the same engine as P1.

Just planting ideas in your head

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Damn straight that'd be awesome! I wish more programmers would just screw around on side little projects like that esp on these old programs.

 

[Tweed]

Sounds like a worthwhile undertaking, get on it.

 

[Francois424]

Awesome thread,

I keep hoping someone uplifts Phantasie I and II to the Phantasie III engine - Complete with better sounds/graphics from the AtariST/Amiga version of P3, and BOTH keyboard/mouse support (hence why I chose the P3 engine in the first place).
Some ppl hate limb damage, so I'd be okay with an optional difficulty checklist when creating a new game or in the options menu. Personally I don't mind it as it's only an issue early game... Phantasie 3 is also missing some monster (Kobold/Orcs looks the same and are awful compared to P1, different colord dragons like green and orange from memory), and terrain sprites (pools/deep desert mostly). But it's leagues ahead of P1/P2 most of the time.

I must say Harlin's project is awesome... just for fixing the buggy spells and removing the annoying 65'536xp per journey limit, and hopefully the gold limit (I'd want a shared gold account so much, P3 really spoiled me with it's mechanics improvements). I wish I could pick a "Sprite" character from the main list, make her a Wizard or w/e, and just hit "Reroll" on the stat page until I get the stats I want before accepting it, but let's get a good solid port to PC first.
Hopefully we'll get a release of P2 on PC as well in the future.

In the meantime, I managed to redo the map of Phantasie I using the tiles from Phantasie 3. I used some random pics found on google for the deep desert and the pool tiles (Deep desert looks jarring, but that's the best I could do).
Here is how it looks : Can't imbed image in my post, here's the link instead

Too bad we can't open it full size in that link as far as I am trying, feel free to download to check in detail

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Chris Koźmik

I agree with what everyone above has said regarding dungeons. The only thing I didn't like about LoA were the simplistic dungeons. Simply adding some puzzles here and there, or even some unique text-based encounters would be nice.

Phantasie I has some really great dungeons with unique themes and fun interactions, while still having comparatively simple layouts. I'd definitely recommend checking out that game (or at least a walkthrough) for inspiration.

I still hope for a Phantasie series facelift in a single engine for 1-4 and a construction set. I am still partial to the c64 P1-2 though.

 

[Francois424]

KeighnMcDeath Oh yeah, it's overdue. The C64 has the best challenges for P1/P2 IMHO, it feels like Phantasie3 minus the limb damage.
Construction Set? interesting. A proper engine and we could "redo" the classics ourselves.

Not confident in the Phantasie Resurrection project (referred as Phantasie 5 I think). The paperdolls looks nice, but those early maps feel very cheap... Worse than Phantasie I... but these screenshots might be obsolete.
But darn do I want an uplift of the series myself. I love AtariST P3 the most because of that, bit P3 is so small compared to P1.