How is character generation supposed to work in Amstrad and Spectrum?
It is not clear to me how character generation and storage is supposed to work. I found the party merger program on Disk 2 (using Amstrad CPC version currently), but reference is made to a party disk there, as well as in the game itself. I don't see a way to generate a party disk nor a way to create a character.
I saw another post in one of the forums on this site that said you had to delete a character in order to generate a new one. That seems odd for this game.
My ultimate objective is to gather all the music from all the versions, and organize them by tune rather than by name. Then make some youtube videos. Zin LP has made the best ones and likely chose the best music, but I'm rather completionist, so I probably won't rest until I get them all. So why play all the games on all the versions? I want to have a representative backdrop from each version from actual game play. So once I get these things recorded, I could have a Commodore video for example that goes through all the tunes from Bard's Tale I, then those from II which were not in I, etc. All with scenes from the game. Same for each platform. Likewise a video for each tune with the various platforms per tune. I may choose NTSC timings for some and PAL timings for others. In order to do any game play I need better than Level 1 characters.. To get that I need better character rolls than the defaults.
Thanks!
Amstrad and Spectrum
Re: Amstrad and Spectrum
Yes that’s pretty much it (at least on the Spectrum version - I’m assuming the Amstrad version works the same and is basically a Z80 port of the Spectrum code)
If the party was full then you had to permanently remove a character in order to be able to create another one. You then saved the whole party to a blank tape.
The party merger utility could be used to load in two versions of the party then remove one character (e.g. if they were dead or heavily level drained) to swap in a previous version of the char, and then resave so that the rest of the party didn’t lose XP or items, but it was such a hassle that I used it about once and usually just took the hit on reloading the previous party if my party lost > 1 members
There’s no music at all on the ZX version, so you won’t need that for your project. Eventually I’d like to create a Zx version with AY bard songs (amongst other enhancements) but that’s a slow burner of a project, still disassembling the code...
If the party was full then you had to permanently remove a character in order to be able to create another one. You then saved the whole party to a blank tape.
The party merger utility could be used to load in two versions of the party then remove one character (e.g. if they were dead or heavily level drained) to swap in a previous version of the char, and then resave so that the rest of the party didn’t lose XP or items, but it was such a hassle that I used it about once and usually just took the hit on reloading the previous party if my party lost > 1 members
There’s no music at all on the ZX version, so you won’t need that for your project. Eventually I’d like to create a Zx version with AY bard songs (amongst other enhancements) but that’s a slow burner of a project, still disassembling the code...