I've played most of the Gold Box games that were published for Amiga in the 80s and early 90s. Being built off the same game engine, the series by and large didn't change very much across four years and almost a dozen games. Some titles are better than others, and all stand in the shadow of the original Pool of Radiance much like the children of celebrities do.
But one thing about the Gold Box games for Amiga has always baffled me: the installation process (or lack thereof). Of course all of these games can be played off disks. But most offer installations for users with hard drives - even though in the early days most Amiga users didn't have one.
What's so weird, though, is virtually every single game in the series that tells you how to install the games to hard drive in a totally unique set of instructions. Or none at all. And sometimes, it's even buggy.
Last night I decided to finally play Treasures of the Savage Frontier, a game I've been procrastinating to play for years. This was quite possibly the last Gold Box game to be made available for Amiga. It was this one or the 4th and final installment to the Dragonlance series, The Dark Queen of Krynn, as they were both released in 1992. It was during 1992 when SSI ultimately decided to pull away from Amiga when they put Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed on DOS-only, and never looked back.
Anyway, last night I pulled the box off the shelf and admired it one more time. It's extremely hard for me to look at the box art and not smile. Or literally guffaw. That hair!
I peered at the tiny copyright date on the box and verified: 1992. End of the line for the Amiga's journey with SSI. OK, I thought, this should be as polished an experience as possible. I inserted the first disk of three.
The only icon available in the drawer was for a save utility program. It's for either creating a save disk or transferring characters from the 1st game in the series (Treasures is game #2 of 2). After a brief eye-roll, I pulled out the card insert for Amiga owners with installation instructions. The only thing the card mentioned was how to run this game - off disk! "Insert the disk and boot your machine." Oh no you don't, SSI.
I looked at the files from within DOpus and saw a "disk a" drawer amongst mostly Workbench related directories and files. I dragged over the 'disk a' folder. On disk 2 there was a "disk B" (yep, capitalized this time) as well as the game executable. I dragged over the file and the folder. Disk 3 had "disk c". Dragged that over. Then, I created a default hammer icon for the executable. I'm going to create my own custom icon for the game later. I'd done this once before, but it was on a different machine and I've no idea where I've put that stuff at this point.
Anyway, I double-clicked the default icon I made with DOpus to launch the game. That's right, I rolled the dice and didn't even bother with an assign. I like to live on the edge.
Game fired right up! Only thing I have left to do is create a party tonight and save the game. Assuming the save process works it's just yet another completely bizarre example of SSI flipping Amiga owners the bird (in a strangely lazy way) assuming everyone only used disks. It's just so weird - especially when some of the earlier games provided on-disk HD installation programs.
Note:
I played and finished the first game in this series, Gateway to the Savage Frontier in 2018 five years ago on my Amiga 2000. But I lost my files from that game (I think). I should flip through my stack of disks one last time... Even though I played it on hard disk I could have sworn I saved the party files to a disk at some point thinking I'd need them for this later installment. But I may have to just start from scratch.
Honestly part of me wanted to replay the first game just so there was more story continuity here, but deep down I'm imagining the two stories aren't that tightly woven. Same "universe" but probably independent stories for the most part.
At least I can reuse my character's names even if I can't remember what their classes were.