Sunday 10 September 2006

Pic of the day: Sometime during the intervening years, my self-image has changed to that of ancient Merlin...

DosBox+MoM=Love

If you have the bad fortune to compulsively read my years-ago entries for the last week or two, as I have, then you would have noticed that the old game Master of Magic pops up in this season at least two different years. In days of yore, it was one of my favorite games. Unlike Daggerfall, and later Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes, it was not something I played literally every week, or actually almost every day. Rather, something would remind me of the game, and I would play it day and night for some days, and then suddenly stop.

The reason for the sudden stop, I'm afraid, was usually technical. For most of the time my Chaos Node has existed (and yes, it is named after a feature in this very game) I could only play it on my old portable running Windows 98. And even there it did not run too well. I could get it to run, but in most cases the game would die irrevokably in the mid or end part of the game. After I had spent a day or two or three building my empire, one of my computer opponents would cast some spell that the machine was not capable of handling, and the game would crash and lock up the computer. Reloading did not help. Reloading an earlier game did not help. Once the game came to that particular point in time, it would crash just as hard again. Particularly when Ariel was among my computer opponents, it seemed to me, but there were probably more of them that did this.

Over time, my laptop became harder and harder to use itself. The batteries no longer held power, and the power cord had to be inserted injust this unnatural angle and kept there for the machine to run. Eventually it no longer ran at all. Goodbye Daggerfall, and goodbye Master of Magic.

***

From time to time, I have seen other gamers refer to a program called DosBox. It runs under Windows XP and also other platforms such as Linux, and faithfully emulates the environment of an old PC running MS-DOS. There are many ways to configure it if the standard configuration does not fit your old software. I downloaded it a couple times and tried, but with no success. Today I tried again. I failed again. Then I looked up a couple web sites still dedicated to the game (because it really is that good, even though it came out in 1994!) and found Master of Magic Stuff which under "guides" has a how-to with pictures. I followed it and suddenly it worked. I think I had used slash instead of backslash, which is perfectly acceptable in Windows XP but which I now vaguely recall was not so under MS-DOS.

Be that as it may, it worked. It worked! I once again have the most awesome strategy game of all time running on my computer! And it runs fast and smooth too, when I give it around 5000 cycles. Slightly better than on the portable, actually.

So why is this game so awesome? The graphics are certainly "long in the tooth" as they say. It may have been pretty in 1994, but it is not exactly third millennium. The music is really uplifting, but it does have a certain tinny quality associated with that age of gaming. And the artificial intelligence is to point and laugh at. Or so it seems.

Or so it seems until you sit down and think over exactly how complex this game is. Think of it as Civilization meets Dungeons & Dragons in the world of Magic: The Gathering, and you start to get an idea. You take a small hamlet and build an empire by exploring the land, sending settlers to found new cities (or conquer existing ones), clear out dungeons and ruins to find gold, magic, spells or magic items, clear out magic nodes and tap the continuous magic supply from them (all these things are guarded by various monsters), summon heroes (or employ the lesser heroes who show up spontaneously as your fame grows) and equip them with magical items, research and cast a multitude of spells, which depend on the particular mix of spellbooks you chose when you started your game, meet four competing wizards with different types of magic and outcompete them and most likely meet them in open war on two different planes or planets, in order to become the one and only MASTER OF MAGIC!

There is no way the artificial intelligence that ran on MS-DOS computers could handle this complexity. It could win by cheating insanely, but it could not balance that many factors. It probably would not be possible even today. We may have the computers to pull it off, but it would be hideously expensive to hire the expertise to code that kind of complex behavior. The game therefore is not so much a challenge of wits, at least unless you play the multiplayer shell (which I don't). The challenge is to develop a strategy that lets you win despite the all-out cheating of the computer opponents. I usually play on the next to highest level, since on the highest levels random differences in starting conditions are multiplied out of all proportions. At the level I play, there are several strategies that are almost always successful. But to build the best empire you can, you will have to adapt to the utterly random starting conditions. And you can start the game over with a different race, or a different mix of spellbooks or other benefits that replace spellbooks (such as alchemy, fame, charisma, faster summoning or faster creating of items). Each game will play out differently.

You could play the game for 12 more years and still each game would be unique. And God willing, I just may. Though hopefully not all day and night anymore.