Every once in a while I get an intense longing to try a game genre I’ve not experienced in a while. These cravings are entirely unexplainable and often lead me to strange purchasing decisions. I’m a big fan of the PlayStation Portable but I have to admit the main reason I got it back in 2005 was because suddenly, inexplicably, I had a yearning to rearrange falling blocks.
Flash forward to a few weeks ago, I had an intense longing to play a dungeon crawler. This longing was not entirely inexplicable, however. I was gritting my teeth through Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne’s inconsistent designs right about then and I really wanted to play a game that did dungeon crawling right.
I specifically had a craving for Dungeon Master as it was to my mind still the finest example of the genre. I was very keen to discover if the FTL Games classic was every bit as good as my memories of playing it on the Atari ST suggested. The innovative spellcrafting system, the devious puzzles and remarkable realism all combined to create a game that was not only ahead of its time but rarely surpassed. Or so my memory had me believe.
Alas, I lack the means to experience Dungeon Master again. My Atari ST is junk, the floppy discs but a memory and it seems that longing will remain unfulfilled for now. If only some digital distribution service that specialises in old games that are good would grab the rights for the PC version of this title.
Hint, hint.
However, by sheer coincidence, Good Old Games did choose to release Might & Magic VI: Limited Edition, a package containing the first six Might & Magic games. Having put a few hours into the third title of the franchise back in the day, I knew perfectly well the M&M games were essentially low-calory RPGs. With all due respect to New World Computing, I found the M&M style significantly less ambitious than the gold standard that was Ultima. Still, the thought of seeing how well these old timey hackenslashers held up was appealing.
There was also the matter of satisfying that dungeon crawling craving.
GOG and DOS
Remarkably, Might & Magic I through 6 are all playable on Windows XP without issue. GOG does a tremendous job with its custom installers to ensure its games play well on today’s systems and playing these titles today is probably easier than it was back then. Today’s gamer need not puzzle over mystifying IRQs for soundcards, need not worry about autoexec.bat and config.sys details and needn’t bother trying to desperately squeeze every last bit of memory out of conventional memory. Simply pay USD9.99, download GOG’s 553MB installer, install and double-click on an icon to be instantly transported back to a time when state of the art graphics meant 256 colours. Time travel has never been cheaper or easier.
Part of the reason the process is so simple is DOSBox, the single best thing to happen to retrogaming. Everything just works. That said, there are a few tweaks you might want to do to DOSBox’s configuration to suit personal taste.
The configuration file to look for is located in the individual M&M folders. In the default installation, they’re in:
Program Files>GOG.com>Might & Magic VI Limited Edition.
Each M&M title has its own custom DOSBox configuration file within its folder For instance, for Might & Magic III – The Isles of Terra, the file is named dosboxMM3.conf. Back that up and edit it in your text editor of choice. The documentation for the configuration settings can be found on the DOSBox wiki here.
If you prefer to run these games in a window (the default is fullscreen), change the fullscreen setting to false.
Another thing worth looking at is the scaler setting. This determines how much the window is scaled as well as the smoothening of jaggies. At the default setting, the text looks like this:
When set to advmame2x, the text looks like this:
There’s a tradeoff there and it’s best left to individual gamer to decide if slightly smoother graphics are worth slightly wonky text.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must be off to 1991, the year Guns ‘N’ Roses exhorted us to use our illusion, Bill and Ted battled Death, MicroProse released Civilization, and the year the Might & Might franchise transported gamers to the Isles of Terra.
