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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Mar 05, 2022 10:34 am

Many of you know I've had this long quixotic project to play a particular game on Amiga: Dungeon Master 2 (DM2). While the game can actually load and run on Amiga, certain sections of the game come to a grinding halt due its incredible performance demands. As a result, I’ve never been able to beat the final boss on any Amiga machine I’ve tried.
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I've now played this game on an A2000, A3000 (16 and 50 Mhz), A1200, Quadra 700 (40 Mhz), PC P2 (400Mhz), Powerbook Pismo (500 Mhz).


The game simply doesn’t run well on machines with slow processing speeds from the 80s and early 90s. This is particularly apparent in:
  • Any areas with multiple enemies. This will drop frame rates dramatically, which makes some battles extremely difficult for the wrong reasons.
  • Environments which employ a rain effect (which is where half the game takes place).
  • Its animated movement system. DM2 introduced an “interesting” 2-step movement system which you can’t disable that slows things down even more. I think this was an attempt to compete with the smooth flowing movements found in games like Doom. It didn’t work very well on slower machines and creates a tendency for your party to walk into walls, which causes them to take damage.
I originally played DM2 on an Amiga 2000 with a GeForce 030/40. I knew I was probably in some trouble while playing that game when I entered an area filled with large giants throwing axes at me. The frame rates would quickly plummet within a few moments, especially when the environment was raining heavily.

I was able to get through it and the other areas in the game that chugged. But by the time I got to the final boss, Dragoth, the frame rates dropped to about 1-3 frames per second. For me this made beating the blue demon completely impossible.

The final battle is a fast-action one that requires a lot of “square dancing” battle movement with quick reflexes. You’re on a small cloud (I’m not kidding) during this battle. If you fall off the edge during your frantic dancing everyone takes damage and you’ll wake up in a random location in the dungeon below. Basically, you’ll quickly decide to restart from your last save rather than travel all the way back to the fight on foot. You have to shoot and hit Dragoth countless times while party members around you die off one by one. But if you survive to the end and beat him, you’ve won.

At 1-3 frames per second I could never get any sense of timing my moves and attacks. Finally admitting defeat after getting that far and investing so much time and emotion really hit me hard. As such I’ve been on a fruitless mission of sorts ever since, trying to find an Amiga - any Amiga - where I could play and beat this fantastic game. And no, I don’t have a Vampire.

A few years ago I had an unaccelerated NTSC 1200 HD and tried it on that machine. Nope.

It’s worth noting I also played DM2 (after a LOT of #&$^$%* driver tweaking) on a Pentium 2 PC running Windows 98/DOS @ 400Mhz and it was smooth as butter. It rocked. But I wasn’t ready to go all-in on PC/DOS gaming just yet even though it had definitely tickled my nostalgia bone for that era.

Fast forward a bit. I got a MacPlay CD-version for my beautiful Macintosh Quadra 700, which I’d mildly upgraded with an 040/40 Mhz processor card. Thus, one-tenth the CPU speed of the PC and the same CPU Mhz as the 030 Amiga 2000 but with a slightly improved chip.
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A bonus of the Mac version over Amiga is you can either install it to HDD, or (sigh) play right off a CD-ROM.


It definitely performed better than the A2K, but would still noticeably chug during the rainy Axe Men area and other sections inside the dungeon when a lot of enemies were on-screen.
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I made it all the way to the end of the game before transferring to a higher-performing machine. I decided to give it a go first, though, with a margarita at-hand. I make everything so hard. ;)


I knew that by the time I made it to the final boss stage I would need to transfer my game saves over to my Powerbook Pismo @500Mhz to have any chance in hell in playing it smoothly.

So, I moved my files over and - boom! - I beat Dragoth on my second attempt with sweaty hands and my blood pressure dangerously high. It was an absolute thrill! It made me feel so good that I’d finally beaten the game, but it also left me sad that I hadn’t been able to beat it on any of my Amigas.

One issue I have with the Macintosh version, which comes on a CD-ROM, is that it is a direct port of the PC/DOS game. Frankly, the character designs in the Amiga version (and the music on the Amiga) - in my opinion - are simply better than the PC/Mac version. Not for any technical reason, but for artistic choices made by FTL. For some reason a lot of the character art was done quite differently on the PC and the Amiga art was made to be a bit more gritty in most cases and less overtly cartoonish. I prefer how the Amiga’s art was conceived.

While the original Dungeon Master made on the Atari ST is often the most talked about game in the series for lots of valid reasons (and trust me - I LOVE DM1), for me certain aspects of DM2 make it more enjoyable to play.

And, especially on Amiga.
  • The music. IT'S SO GOOD!
  • As stated above, the graphics in DM2 are so much cooler on Amiga than the DOS/Mac versions. In the latter, they go really cartoony across the board. It's as if the PC version went full-on Saturday Morning Cartoons, to match the occasional animated cut-scenes FTL produced across its game library.
  • Half of the game is played outside - with weather (yet never any sun) - rather than in a seemingly endless dungeon within stone wall corridors.
  • DM2 goes a lot heavier into the bizarre steam punk sci-fi theme, especially once you make it into Stonekeep.
  • Did I mention the music? It’s so good. I wish FTL had released a soundtrack CD for the game like they did for the original (even though the original had no in-game music).
I tried playing DM2 on a stock Amiga 3000 @ 16Mhz and it was unsurprisingly a total no-go, too.

Fast-forward a little more.

I recently got a Cyberstorm 060 @50 Mhz for one of my A3ks which is equipped with a zz9000. And let me just say off the top - that machine is rock solid and super kick ass, 100%. Everything is smooth and creamy in most of what I do.

So… I had to see. I just had to.

Right off the bat, the game will crash if I’m using any P96 drivers. In order for the game to run, I had to disable my Monitors drivers entirely and run in the Amiga’s native modes (still through the ZZ card, but bypassing any RTG).

The game runs beautifully in the early stages. It looks fantastic and plays smoothly even in the rainy areas. I knew, however, the real test would be the Axe Men.

After several days of playing - taking my time, because I love this part of the game so much - I got to the Axe Men area. Incredibly, it wasn’t raining. So that actually gave me a bit of a performance boost, so to speak. And, perhaps that made the test not entirely “fair.”

But I set up a camera and pressed record. Note you’ll not see more than 2 giants on-screen at a given time.


At first, things seemed to be looking pretty good. As time ticked on, and the giant animations of his axe swings progressed, the frame rates would suddenly stutter.

Worth noting:
  • As you pick up heavy items (like the axes) and put them in your inventory, it’s painfully easy to burden your characters. They will actually start to walk slower on purpose.
  • And, any time you cross a map threshold (like the tree entrance you see in the video) there’s always a pause between sections regardless of the machine/OS you’re running.
However, what I noticed was the following:
  • The longer I played in the Axe Men area, even if I didn’t pick anything up their animations had serious trouble rendering. The deeper I went, the more they would nearly freeze the game for a second or more mid-swing. When it started to rain this became much worse.
  • Within 2 minutes of playing this section, the only way I could clear it out was to actually restart the game. As soon as I did, the game would play smoothly until I entered the Axe Men area and they began to appear. As soon as the action started, I could very noticeably tell the game was sliding down a hill of diminishing performance.
From AmigaLove site member LASooner:
I was a tester at Interplay in 95, believe me when I say any and all bugs I submitted at this late stage of Amiga game development were basically ignored. They just wanted it out the door.
Conclusion:
Even running an 060 @ 50 Mhz (revision 1 CPU) I fear I’d have a really difficult time beating the final boss under these conditions. When you get to Dragoth, he unleashes countless metal flying drones at you which shoot lightening bolts. This is all going on while he’s also firing at you, and we’re both dancing around. It’s a very delicate situation. And if the screen freezes over and over I simply can’t get any of my timings just right. Not for a battle that lasts as long as that one.

I simply don’t think even this post-Commodore bankruptcy glorious system is the ticket. I’ve read that later revision 060’s can be overclocked. I’m not well-versed in any of that and would need to educate myself to see if it would be worth the effort.

Part of me almost wants to keep going just to see. But deep down, I think I already know.





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