Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Dorateen]

How SSI lost the license:
"Everything was going great and the games were a huge success. Then the president of TSR decided she needed lots more money from the computer games license. Against my advice TSR dropped SSI and replaced them. The new company made all sorts of promises they didn't deliver. The new company promised to design even more games than SSI and they didn't come close. In short the revenue the new company generated was far less than what SSI delivered; what a surprise."

Uh, the "new company" he mentions there is Interplay, right? I mean yeah, by the time they finally put out a good D&D game, TSR was gone...

At first, I thought he was talking about Westwood Studios who developed the later SSI games.

 

[Elwro]

Has anyone had any luck with the Gold Box Companion and WINE under Linux? I'm trying to use it for WINE-installed Champions of Krynn. So I run the GBC under WINE, tell it to look for my GOG games catalog and it finds my WINE Krynn installation. So far, so good. I click 'Start game' from inside the GBC and it runs. However, when I load up a save in the game, all A-J save game buttons in the GBC stay greyed out. Any pointers?

edit: it started working. I don't know why.

 

[RNGsus]

I started a playlist for the Gold Box. They won't work for everyone, obviously.



I tried several on youtube, but none worthy of the quest. Maybe I should make two: one metal, one ambient.

 

[Ethaliel]

I started a playlist for the Gold Box. They won't work for everyone, obviously.



I tried several on youtube, but none worthy of the quest. Maybe I should make two: one metal, one ambient.

Good idea but video is unavailable. Hope it's temporary.

 

[Dedup]

One thing I would of liked is if Gold Box Companion had integrated VLC to play different playlists based on the maps. So have s separate list for dungeons, towns, battle map, overworld map and maybe one for the treasure screen (like a fanfare).

I had thought about maybe asking for the source code to see if I could do it myself, but I wouldn't know where to start as all I can do is basic bitch programming with stolen code in Excel's VB.

 

[smaug]

One thing I would of liked is if Gold Box Companion had integrated VLC to play different playlists based on the maps. So have s separate list for dungeons, towns, battle map, overworld map and maybe one for the treasure screen (like a fanfare).

I had thought about maybe asking for the source code to see if I could do it myself, but I wouldn't know where to start as all I can do is basic bitch programming with stolen code in Excel's VB.

You can ask Joonas if he plans on adding it in.

 

[GarfunkeL]

That's a brilliant idea!

 

[Elwro]

I agree!

 

[Dedup]

I shot Joonas off an email. If he replies to it and not in the thread I'll post his response.

 

[Joonas]

Any suggestions on how to configure that kind of thing?

Would it be enough to have folders like overworld, combat etc. and then randomly play files from these folders depending on the situation?

 

[Elwro]

Well, for me it would be a great first step Thanks for even considering it.

 

[Dedup]

Any suggestions on how to configure that kind of thing?

Would it be enough to have folders like overworld, combat etc. and then randomly play files from these folders depending on the situation?

Yeah, that would be one way to do it. Another way I was thinking was to have users make their own VLC playlist files outside of GBC, then in GBC you would have an interface that lets you point to which playlist file to play in which area/situation.

Either way would be great though.

Thanks for looking into this.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Better not to have it tied down to VLC or any individual media player. You never know what might happen in the future.

Different folders, play a random tune from them - that's easy enough to setup and can run with any media player.

 

[Joonas]

Here's an early version of Gold Box Companion with music support:
http://gbc.zorbus.net/gbc_audio.zip

It needs the base GBC package:
http://gbc.zorbus.net/gbc.zip

Copy the contents of "gbc_audio.zip" to the base GBC folder. Run "GBC_Audio.exe".

This version doesn't use an external player but GBC plays the audio files itself (by using BASS.dll). The sample music files included are from opengameart.org. Audio doesn't work on Windows XP, probably needs at least Vista or 7.

In the "Music" folder there's a configuration file for each game and several subfolders for music files.
Copy wanted music files to the subfolders. Supported types: MP3, OGG, WAV, AIFF, XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX.

From GBC_Audio.txt:

You can configure and customize each game's music by editing its configuration file.

Files from the "World" folder are randomly played when the player is on the world map.
Files from the "Combat" folder are randomly played during combat.
After combat, one random file from the "Victory" folder is played.
Each area (town, dungeon etc.) can be pointed to a wanted subfolder.
Currently areas are pointed to "Town" and "Dungeon".

You can stop the music by right clicking the HUD or pressing ESC when the HUD window is focused.
Volume can be adjusted with F1 and F2 when the HUD window is focused. There's no visual indicator for these.

Each FRUA design has its own music configuration file. This will be automatically created when you choose a design from the design dropdown-list in GBC.

Let me know if this works.

 

[Dedup]

Wish I could brofist you a hundred times for this. I tested it a bit on Pool of Radiance and so far it works great. I'm surprised you were able to whip something up so quickly. I guess I know what I'm doing over Christmas.

 

[Sinatar]

Oh man this would have been super useful for when I streamed all the Gold Box games, I had custom playlists going but it was too much work to get specific music for specific events.

 

[Null Null]

I can see going a few different directions with this, as it's really all a matter of taste:

The games came out in 1988-1992, I want to listen to what a typical teenager would back then--hard rock/top 40.

The games came out in 1988-1992, I want to listen to what a D&D-playing teenager would back then--as above, more heavy metal (80s-era thrash).

I am a huge 80s fan, I want to listen to music inspired by that era but using modern technology--synthwave.

I want the equivalent of Final Fantasy background music--chiptunes.

 

[curds]

I feel like the KotC soundtrack would work well with the GB games.

 

[DeepOcean]

Ok guise, I'm thinking of doing a full playthrough of all Gold Box games and the FRUA modules, the big question, I'm used to setup DosBox with no problem but I'm curious about Dungeon Craft, did someone ported the FRUA modules to that engine? Last time I heard about it was on a really old thread by Jaesun. How is the support for bigger screens and resolutions on Dungeon Craft? My old monitor died and I'm using my TV as monitor and I'm antecipating trouble to setup the screen to not look ugly as fuck.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Ok guise, I'm thinking of doing a full playthrough of all Gold Box games and the FRUA modules, the big question, I'm used to setup DosBox with no problem but I'm curious about Dungeon Craft, did someone ported the FRUA modules to that engine? Last time I heard about it was on a really old thread by Jaesun. How is the support for bigger screens and resolutions on Dungeon Craft? My old monitor died and I'm using my TV as monitor and I'm antecipating trouble to setup the screen to not look ugly as fuck.

I've kept one eye on Dungeon Craft, but unfortunately it never seemed to go anywhere. I wish they found a way to make the old modules compatible with Dungeon Craft, as that might have been a big help in boosting interest.

 

[Fyrinn]

So I've recently got super into Pool of Radiance, to the point where I've honestly been spending an unhealthy amount of time playing it. Unfortunately tonight, after clearing the Wealthy Area, I fled a battle with some orcs and seem to have lost many, many hours of progress.

The encounter happened right when I entered the NW entrance of the Wealthy Area from Kovel Mansion's SW entrance, and after I selected "Flee" I ended up inside some building I didn't recognize. Immediately Gold Box Companion's map vanished and displayed some sort of "GEO" error, but I didn't think much of it and just kept navigating through the building to get back onto the street, because I assumed I'd just been "bumped" into the adjacent building in the Wealthy Area when fleeing the encounter. When I went out onto the street I think I was actually in a different area entirely (I noticed green vines on the walls, if that helps), and when I tried to exit the area I got the flashing "LOADING...PLEASE WAIT" freeze (the same type you get if you try to exit from the bugged wall in the southern building of the Wealthy Area). Now where I really fucked up was that immediately after being "teleported" I saved my game, and being an idiot who doesn't keep in the habit of maintaining multiple saves, I now seem to have a bugged out save file that won't load at all: when I try to load my save I see the standard "LOADING...PLEASE WAIT," but it immediately crashes back to a DOS error message reading "Unable to load geo in Load3DMap." I've tried Googling this and can't seem to find anyone else who's had the same problem.

Hoping that we have some wise Gold Box experts on here who can help me fix this. I don't know if maybe there's some sort of save editing trick I could use to get out of this?

Thanks.

EDIT: OK, when I try to load up my save in Gold Box Companion it seems like my characters are still intact, but my location in in the game seems to be bugged out. Is there some application that could help me edit my save in order to put me back in a "proper" place?

Here's what GBC says about my save:

- Save file "SAVGAMA.DAT" loaded (13137 bytes).
- Party size 6 characters.
- ERROR: Could not identify current map! (GEO 1, 0)
- Outdoors party coordinates: 13,27.
- Indoors party coordinates: 08,11, facing N.

 

[Fyrinn]

Ignore above post; I emailed Joonas who rescued my save file and thus my adventuring life. I actually didn't realize he also posted here, so now I'm sorta embarrassed!!

(Thanks again! )

 

[ProphetSword]

While this probably won't seem related to the Gold-Box games, I recently revived my Commodore 64. I bought a product called the BackBit cartridge that helped to modernize my C64 and let me play games on it with fast loading times. I wrote a review of the product that you can read here:

https://enragedgeeks.blogspot.com/2020/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

The main reason I bring this up is that the C64 was home to some great CRPGs, including the Gold-Box games. As you can see, I've been tooling around with "Death Knights of Krynn" on the system (if only I hadn't caught the reflection of the overhead lights when I took the picture of my CRT screen).

Playing these games on a vintage system will definitely put hair on your chest. Emulators are for wimps.

 

[RNGsus]

Can you migrate your Dragonlance party to Spelljammer?

 

[Jo498]

One thing vastly underappreciated by most people is the use of Animate Dead in Pool of Radiance.
In addition to working as a semi-resurrection spell (animated characters will fight but not cast spells, and can 'trade' items away so it may be preferable to kill NPCs and animate them), the spell will reanimate large numbers of dead humanoid enemies and set them to working for you. It's really kind of fun.

It sure is. I did this the very first time I played this game, despite being a newbie not knowing anything. Of course, after trying it on a PC I re-loaded and did it later only with the hired Hero. We even re-designed his icon as some black zombie warrior. However, I did NOT know that one could raise enemies during a battle and have these zombies fight on ones side.
Again, it is amazing that PoR, despite some quirks, has cool features that vanished in the following GB games.
(The topic justifiies necroing this after several years)