Dungeon Master Forum

I finished DM a couple of days ago (have just finished CSB today) and ended up with something I've never encountered before:

I wanted to rush the fight with the dragon, so decided to just throw off all those poison potions (collected during my journey) at once. In the same time, i frose time non-stop with the green boxes (which here too i didn't use at all ).

Anyway, at one point, i cast some fireballs too, and then this happended :

it's an animated gif, hope it's ok


Maybe i throw too much at one time because it seems the game couldnt cope with all these elements. As i was throwing literaly everything at this poor chap (which has not a single chance to defend itself), I noticed that the game was beginning to respond slower & slower - but for some reason (actually the reason is that i wanted to end the game quickly), i just carried on throwing stuff

It's just something i have never seen in this game (poison clouds & fireball that never end). I then walked in the never-ending-spell, and got an error from the game.

Ah well, i guess next time i will be more respectful in my approach..

I had something similar many years ago in the amiga version. I threw all my arrows, darts, daggers etc. onto a monster with many hitpoints (I guess it was a scorpion), but all these projectiles did not kill it. Later on, I defeated another monster with magic. The game froze for a moment, then all my throwing weapons appeared on the floor, and in the air was a never ending ZO spell explosion.
I never managed to replicate that, however.

That's definitely an interesting bug - I have never seen or heard of it before, but I did encounter a weird bug during my playthrough of Dungeon Master a couple of years ago which caused a glowing orb to appear in the air [and remain there indefinitely] which looked somewhat like a Des Ew (i.e., harm non-material beings) spell or a materializer when it has phased out of existence except for its ball-like core. The bug, which is apparently triggered by Gigglers stealing certain types of items, is described in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?p=160546#p160546


--Jay

I agree with jayrshaw, this is most probably caused by cloned items, which can create all sorts of weird effects. You probably had a Ven Potion that was stored in a chest at one point in the game, and you never placed it back on the dungeon floor before throwing it to the Dragon.

@Jay - Still, as you mentionned, the spell died out by itself. I too (almost sure of it), have encontered similiar bugs in my previous playthrough. The thing that (here too), it just lasted couple of seconds. So in the end i didn't much pay attention.

In this case, the thing seems to be a bit more nasty (the spell lives on forever) + as you walk in it (wanted to collect my steaks after all), you have this error (code 50 i think) as the game then got itself frozen/corrupted.

I read (partially) the link.. i get it's due to something that was never fixed in the code for some reason. But still, it's something very rare, and it's a nice piece of bug if you ask me .. I played this version quite many times, and other than that, the game is absolutely bug-free (hence my surprise).

Thanks all for the input

I have uploaded the list of bugs I compiled for my ReDMCSB documentation here: http://dmweb.free.fr/Stuff/ReDMCSB/Docu ... hanges.htm
See BUG0_12 for some details about the bug that most probably affected you.

èné wrote: Sat Dec 17, 2022 8:30 pm @Jay - Still, as you mentionned, the spell died out by itself. I too (almost sure of it), have encontered similiar bugs in my previous playthrough. The thing that (here too), it just lasted couple of seconds. So in the end i didn't much pay attention.

If it only lasts a couple seconds, then stops, that was actually somewhat normal in the Apple IIGS version.
I believe it was because you had been tossing fireballs and bombs faster than the game could render the individual explosions, so it just queued them all up and kept playing the sequence until they were all done.
It was noticeable if you used the keyboard to unleash four PAL or MON level fireballs or lightning bolts in a row in rapid succession, and it happened all the time when I used my "Freeze the dragon and chuck everything I've got at it" strategy. I generally only used two poison bombs at a time until the poison starts to dissipate, but it did happen.

Something similar would also happen in the "make a monster" section of the kid's dungeon if you rapidly clicked on the button. It would queue up all the clicks and then take even longer to keep doing the ZO/DES EW spell effect to summon more monsters. You could even then use the keyboard to move to another button nearby and get two summon effects going at the same time.


On the other hand this had a FINITE number of times the animation would play, in direct relation to your actions.
I always thought it was a hardware limitation and that DM was pushing the Apple IIGS to its limit. The fact that the game required more memory than a stock ROM 1 Apple IIGS shipped with (The game needed just under 1.25mb. The stock IIGS had 256K on the motherboard and shipped with a memory expansion card with an additional 256K that could be expanded via kits sold separately by Apple to 1mb for a total of 1280K aka 1.25mb. If you wanted more memory you had to replace the card with a 3rd party one, which became highly recommended by 1992 to have 4mb).
gave me that impression.

tl;dr? If it happened for a few seconds then stopped, it was just the animations being queued up which take a set amount of time and you sent off too many effects in too short a time so the game had to "catch up". It's not really a bug, it's an issue due to the limited hardware of the time.
If the animations and explosions never stop, THEN it's a bug.