itch.io

In the meantime I did some more digging and found this  weird fact:   https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1961503-solved-windows-10-chm-help-files-...

I didn't have this checkbox so i moved it off the NAS drive to my SSD and .. boom the content appeared.  What a travesty windows tooling is.  Don't tell the user anything, just show a blank page "for security". 

the CHM file doesn't seem to work?  It loads but no content is displayed.
Does the documentation exist in another form?

As a final spoiler for Realms of Quest 1 - I suggest having a backup save before you go down to the final fight.  There's some unfortunate save manipulation the game does.

Welp, I'm a fool.  Realms of Quest 4 comes with vastly improved versions of Realms of Quest 1 and 2.

Any suggestions on how to type £ in vice?  

------------

Well i ended up making a customezed keymapping in vice/vic20/gtk3_pos-pound.vkm with the following snippet

#####################
# |Bit 6|POUND|  *  | ; ] | / ? | S_R |  =  | A_UP| HOME|
sterling        6 0 8
# make pound available on F10, because it's not typeable otherwise
F10             6 0 8

the last two lines were my addition.  This lets me play the game on [;'/ to move, ] for stairs, \ to attack and F10 to run.   There's probably a more natural mapping  but this allows the minimum of changes for any other games and programs.

However, the game itself is .. impossible?  A typical fight (which doesn't appear to give any feedback until it's over?) costs about 5 hit points, or half my health, and gives around 0-3 gold.  Healing costs 50 gold.   So I'm just running out of money fast until broke and then dead.

------
As for Realms of Quest II (2), it seems the second version, written "Realms of Quest II +" is capable of saving to the floppy image, so it's probably the one you want to use.  The first one thinks it should save to tape, and the "mega" version doesn't seem to have a save. 

(Edit: Joke's on me, I can't figure out how to load in Realms of Quest II +.  Just use the version from Realms of Quest IV disk B)

----

Realms of Quest III has the same problem as Realms of Quest 1:  no money.   

Also the "Quit game" feature should probably be able to be disabled.  It's much to easy to fumble into when trying to leave town.  Probably hide it under ctrl-shift-Q or something.  

If possible it would also be a good idea to instead of making the menu a triple-toggle, make it three areas.  "training grounds" "shops and inns" "character menu" with run-stop or something going back to the top level and/or exiting.

----

Oh, and the PDF could use some info on how to load up the collection.

 Put Disk B (or side B) in a drive.  

LOAD"*",8 
...
RUN

If your vic20 is unexpanded, this should bring up the menu.  At least in Vice with expanded memory, it generates a messages about rebooting with unexpanded configuration, and then you have to do the LOAD and RUN again.

----

Any hints on finishing Realms of Quest 1?  On level 6 of the dungeon I can't find stairs down.  I've tried walking through all the walls.  None of the spells seem relevant.  Could there just be an edit error in the maze walls?   ( Edit: Seems the manual fooled me by talking about 1-6 chosing the spell power.  Instead it chooses the set of spells )

Huh, doesn't save by default.  That was a surprise.

Oh, this developer deletes completely legitimate feedback? Awesome.

The experience where the game takes away the UI every 5 minutes was really unfortunate.  

I had fun with this, and I'm a little sad there's no obvious tip jar.  But hey maybe you'd rather not.

Given the 633KB cart, converting it to d64 is probably a large project.  For starters, you'd need to slice it up among like 6 disk sides, and depending upon how elements are used, you might need to make major changes to the game logic.    Even a d81 might be hard with inserting disk read logic everywhere and changing the memory use pattens.

In short all I'm saying is it's a lot of work.

If you have a superfat agnus and have installed 1MB of chip ram and some form of additional 512kb of ram, then yes.

So only some a500s could do this (late run) and only expanded.

Yeah steam is fairly capricious about sexual content in games and homophobia always plays a part.  Last I checked they had adopted a fairly everything goes policy, aside from abusing the system, but it can always change or they can always fail to follow their own rules.

Looking forward to the game, whenever you can complete it.

Hmm, seems I own this game three times now.  Racial Justice bundle, steam purchase, and SEALED IN BOX.

I kind of wish there was an easy mode though where the game wasn't trying to stress me out with YOUR TREES ARE DYING while I'm trying to figure out the interface.

Unasked-for suggestion.

Consider using webp for images and opus for audio, and something like webm for animations in the future.  Opus for audio is the easiest swap over mp3, being both higher quality and smaller.  webm over animated gifs is also pretty easy, at least the way you're using them for full screen animations.  webp probably needs a bit of testing as it has a higher cpu cost, so on the slowest systems could add lag, though the faster load times on rotating disk for the oldest computers might completely erase those costs.

These changes would shrink the 3.3GB current footprint to less than 2GB which would decrease costs for everyone inlcuding you.

Definitely not worth it for this game at this point.

Women should always be welcome to male/male sex entertainment.