User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Aug 02, 2021 11:55 am

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Following in the footsteps of my recent pickup of Deja Vu I also snagged a great copy of Shadowgate.

The 3rd installment in the original set of 4 ICOM MacVenture games, Shadowgate is a point-and-click adventure in a fantasy setting.
It is up to the player to take on the role of "The Seed of Prophecy", enter Castle Shadowgate, solve its puzzles, survive its many traps, and stop the Warlock Lord once and for all. If they survive to the end, they will come across the Warlock Lord just as he succeeds in opening the gates of Hell and summoning the Behemoth. If the player was successful in finding and assembling the holy artifact called the Staff of Ages by this point, then they would be able to mortally wound the demon with it.
If you manage to do all of that, apparently you get the king's daughter as well as a lordship.

This game was also originally created for the Mac and ported all over the place. In fact, there is even a modern version for the Switch!

That disk though

One of the cool things about Deja Vu and it's game-engine kin is that you can copy the disk contents over to a hard drive and play from there. In the case of Deja Vu and Uninvited, all you do is copy "all" to a folder on your hard drive and set up some assigns. You can either invoke the assigns in a shell window before playing, stick them in a custom installer executable script or slap them right into your Startup Sequence. You also need to move over a font (topaz6). That's it!

But Mindscape seems to have inserted some copy protection into these games. Trying to copy over an original disk straight-up will create a Read error at some stage. So we are beholden to either playing off the original disks or finding cracked versions online. Finding working ADFs of these is surprisingly difficult, too.

I was able to locate one (after 2 hours of trial and error) for Deja Vu. I got it all set up and it works great. But I've not been able to find one for Shadowgate. For all of the ADFs out there that I've located, one of two things happens.

1) It either crashes when you quit the program.
2) Or it seeks a physical disk in DF0: even when the program is run from something like Disk Mimic or right off the hard drive.

At this stage I think I'll be playing Shadowgate off the original disk unless I find a better ADF some day, and I certainly don't mind playing it that way at all. It's just a tad annoying I couldn't find a decent image.

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User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:32 am

Wow, that copy protection makes absolutely no sense. I mean, why allow copying all falls but not the disk? You could just copy the files to another floppy and still have a copy so I am not understanding the logic on this one. SuperCard or KryoFlux will copy it. There might also be a parameter for it in one of the era correct copiers too.





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