D&D: Order of the Griffon - How difficult would it be to music patch this game?

[Trenton_net]

Hey everyone,

On another forum section I started a thread asking if anyone knows of a music patch released for the game "D&D: Order of the Griffon". Specifically something to address the fact that music arbitrarily and suddenly turns off anytime a user interaction is performed.

Given that it seems like nothing has been made so far, I wanted to ask how hard it would be for someone to create one (given that person is already familiar with hacking the PCE). If it's something trivial to perform, maybe someone can take a look and see if such a patch could be created? I know lots of people consider the game a fan favorite, so having a patch to fix this obvious and glaring bug would be pretty cool.

[Arkhan]

Be thankful the game has ANY music.   

The PC GoldBox games don't give shit outside of the title screen.

You could probably locate the player code and see if the inputs disable / reset voices when they are called, and just change those to simply do nothing.   It might be as simple as finding the register writes that are disabling PSG channels.

but, it is probably a giant pain in the ass.   I would dig into it and look if I wasn't doing other things.

[Trenton_net]

If I had to give a layman's guess, I would hazard that sound effects cause the music to cut out (to accommodate itself), but then they were too lazy to resume the music. It's such a shame, since otherwise the music and game looks quite awesome.

Hopefully, someone is willing to take a look at this. It sounds like low hanging fruit compared to other ambitious projects people come up with.

[Arkhan]

Yeah, not everyone can be as graceful as we are with sound, I guess.

Not that main/sub channel is a really complicated process, what with it being spelled out in plain Japanese/English basically.

Getting the sound to resume properly would be a mess.

Disabling sound effects all together, or at least preventing the music from stopping, maybe easier.

[Trenton_net]

I sure hope they disabled sound for a good reason. Like having channels overlapping or something. If they just did it out of laziness, that would pretty lame.

[Arkhan]

I suspect that the music was sort of shoehorned in as the engine was likely ported and modified from another 6502 variant's engine.

These games appeared on C64, and Apple II also. 

So, I wouldn't be shocked of large portions were just plunked around.

None of those games had music, so they probably threw it in haphazardly.

So, sound effects probably mute the music because the two interrupt each other...

and they never bother to restart it, because the testers are so used to these games being silent.

[spenoza]

I'm still surprised OotG is so limited. Even the NES port of Pools of Radiance gave you better character options and the like. If OotG doesn't run on a custom engine, it's one of the worst ports of the Gold Box Engine I've ever seen.

What we really need are some GOOD Gold Box games on PCE.

[Zero_Gamer]

I'm still surprised OotG is so limited. Even the NES port of Pools of Radiance gave you better character options and the like. If OotG doesn't run on a custom engine, it's one of the worst ports of the Gold Box Engine I've ever seen.

What we really need are some GOOD Gold Box games on PCE.

All of the NES TSR games blow ass. I do wish you could build your characters from scratch in OoG or at least re-roll your stats.

Nothing can top the gold box games, except maybe Temple of Elemental Evil from early 2000's, but it was kinda buggy.

The dark queen series is my fav, and I still play them from time to time.

[Arkhan]

I'm still surprised OotG is so limited. Even the NES port of Pools of Radiance gave you better character options and the like. If OotG doesn't run on a custom engine, it's one of the worst ports of the Gold Box Engine I've ever seen.

What we really need are some GOOD Gold Box games on PCE.

Pool of Radiance on NES doesn't let you aim diagonally with melee characters.   It's trash as a result.

It also just lists all the available race/class combinations instead of you having to manually do it.

So, all it really gains over the PC ones is the character portraits are a little cooler.  The visuals otherwise are not any better and have less color.

and the battle sprites look more smashed.


PCE could do a GoldBox game the right way.   Look at Isles of Terra. 

but, the game really requires a keyboard to be played properly, so, it's like "eh".

[spenoza]

PCE could do a GoldBox game the right way.   Look at Isles of Terra. 

but, the game really requires a keyboard to be played properly, so, it's like "eh".

Absolutely the PCE could do a good Gold Box game. I think it wouldn't require much of a redesign of the UI to make it gamepad friendly, either. The Apple II versions were hard even with a keyboard if you had a //c because it didn't have a number pad. So I just had to know that 7 was up left.

[Arkhan]

PCE could do a GoldBox game the right way.   Look at Isles of Terra. 

but, the game really requires a keyboard to be played properly, so, it's like "eh".

Absolutely the PCE could do a good Gold Box game. I think it wouldn't require much of a redesign of the UI to make it gamepad friendly, either. The Apple II versions were hard even with a keyboard if you had a //c because it didn't have a number pad. So I just had to know that 7 was up left.

Yes, but apple IIc *supported* the idea.

NES, to my knowledge, just doesn't let you aim diagonally.

A simple cursor like how Ultima V handled it on NES would work.

[spenoza]

Wasn't someone a couple years ago talking about doing a Gold Box port or something? I think they needed to learn to program first, which means it probably wasn't actually going to happen, but it's still nice to think about.

[esteban]

Wasn't someone a couple years ago talking about doing a Gold Box port or something? I think they needed to learn to program first, which means it probably wasn't actually going to happen, but it's still nice to think about.

Yes... Was it Arkhan? But he wanted to port Ultima or Hydlide or Oregon Trial first.

[Arkhan]

Wasn't someone a couple years ago talking about doing a Gold Box port or something? I think they needed to learn to program first, which means it probably wasn't actually going to happen, but it's still nice to think about.

BigusSchmuck was.

It's not a simple thing to do.  lol

the engines are complicated due to all the data being managed.

[spenoza]

Yeah, no kidding. The engines do have a lot going on. And the engines were designed in TurboPascal. Was there ever a Pascal variant for the PCE or was it just BASIC and assembly? Given just how many RPGs were programmed for the Apple II in Pascal, I would be surprised if there weren't some kind of Pascal support for PCE.