Bard's Tale 1 (original 1985 game) Crashing

[jnmaas]

I am honestly more excited about the original trilogy than the new(er) game, but unfortunately Bard's Tale 1 always crashes after 30 mins to 2 hours of gameplay for me -- the screen just freezes and I have to force quit. Anyone else having this problem, or know of fixes?

[Whoopass and Lollipops]

This is so frustrating. Like others I only bought the new BT to play the older ones for nostalgia. Crashes almost instantly. AAAArrrrggggghhhhhhhh

[Bulleta©™®]

Is that moslo thing the way to go to slow the originals down? Gave 2 a whirl and it plays way too fast on Win7. Not really sure if there are better things than moslo or if moslo will work for them or not.

Played 1 very little on the Amiga 500, pseudo-beat 2 on Amiga 500 and Apple 2 (had some wand segments on Amiga, had the others on Apple 2), and got stuck at some part in 3 on Amiga 500. I think I still have the box and 'anti piracy' wheel thing for 3 somewhere.

[zany]

I would also like to see the crashing issues fixed as I also like the original BT series over the newer one.

[billch99]

I got through bards tale 1 easy enough destiny knight[bt2] crashes constantly,unplayable

[stephenrozzi]

Just read on a gog forum that this game (BT 1) will not work on a 64 bit system....it's even listed as "32 bit only" on gog's store page. (my fault for not noticing that) Steam's store page does not list this so maybe those of you who bought this game thru Steam can get a refund due to lack of info on the store page.....Sorry my input wasn't a better solution.

[ed]

It's crashing for me under 8.1 64 bit. I tried it on an XP virtual machine and it seems to work well there. It's kind of hard to start because most of the graphics you click on are missing, but if you know where to click it works.

[identifiedasbeingdisrespectful]

Diposting pertama kali oleh vorik:

wasteland 1 appears to be using a DOS emulator of some kind. Not sure if it's DosBox, inXile's could be a customized fork, since DosBox is on Sourceforge, and has a bit of setup to get it to see hard drives and whatnot. The one in Wasteland is pretty slick... and would probably be their newest version of the emulator.

wow. i would call this Wasteland 1 more of a Wasteland 1 enhanced... this music is terrific. very Firefly.

There's frontends for DosBox and one can write a config file reference into a copy of the exe. That's how steam and GoG get these things to work "out of the box". DosBox isn't difficult at all with a frontend. Now if PCs still had floppy drives.....

[Thundercracker]

Diposting pertama kali oleh sc2mails:

Diposting pertama kali oleh vorik:

wasteland 1 appears to be using a DOS emulator of some kind. Not sure if it's DosBox, inXile's could be a customized fork, since DosBox is on Sourceforge, and has a bit of setup to get it to see hard drives and whatnot. The one in Wasteland is pretty slick... and would probably be their newest version of the emulator.

wow. i would call this Wasteland 1 more of a Wasteland 1 enhanced... this music is terrific. very Firefly.

There's frontends for DosBox and one can write a config file reference into a copy of the exe. That's how steam and GoG get these things to work "out of the box". DosBox isn't difficult at all with a frontend. Now if PCs still had floppy drives.....

unfortunatly, these are using an apple emulator, not dos.

Diposting pertama kali oleh BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!:

Out of curiousity...

Older games running through Steam generally use an emulator like DosBox.

Are these games using that or a similar emulator to run?

If so... most emulators tend to have the ability to "save state" which essentially just stores a copy of everything in memory currently and effectively allows you to save anywhere in any game. Perhaps its possible to do something like that for this and get around the issue. Something like keybinding a key combo to perform a save state and doing it every so often.

the included emulator does indeed save states, the "help menu" for keys tells you the bindings for it.

[solarmande]

I'm having the same issue, and honestly not that surprised after reading a bit about the original dev team and seeing who brought this one to market...also what sense does it make to have to start up the newer game to GET to the originals!? Seems really poorly thought-out. At the very least I'm able to save often with "s" and then just reaload but yeah it's getting pretty frustrating and I'm only level 9 with my party so far.

On a side note I played the original Bard's Tale (I) on an apple IIe and can't remember a single crash back in the day...and man I played for hours and hours and hours...I know architecture has changed a ton since then but is it really so hard to make a stable port?

[Slooge]

using dosbox v 0.74 and it works fine on win7 and win8. However, I did not get my copy from steam or gog, but from bardstale.brotherhood.de years ago. I played this originally on the c64 and again later on the amiga systems but the c64 emulators also emulate disk loading speeds and I can't tolerate the wait anymore :). I prefer the amiga version even with the warrior multi-attack bug (just compensate with a spectre snare after BT1), but dosbox 0.74 runs the PC version just fine without any setting tweaking.

[stephenrozzi]

Sadly, I had either the PS or XBOX version (can't remember the platform, had both) but got distracted by other games at the time. I've tried the pc version on 2 seperate laptops & just can't get the game to run....is it possible to change between 32 & 64 bit? If I can do that maybe it will work....

[Slooge]

I'm using dosbox with default configuration right out of the install in both cases. Here's the startup sequence which may help:

1. Start dosbox
2. Mount the directory where bards tale resides (mount y: e:\games\bardstale\BT1 in my case)
3. change to the Y drive (type y: and hit enter)
4. Start the game (type bard and hit enter)

once the game is started, I tend to set the cpu cycles to just shy of 30,000. You can adjust it by hitting cntrol-f12 to raise it and control-f11 to lower it. On my system, going higher actually degrades performance a bit and 30k seems to be the sweet spot.

Of note, the version that comes attached with "The Bards Tale" here on steam is actually the apple version, so if that is the one you're trying to run, I haven't found a solution for the incredibly bad performance and stutters and gave up trying since I prefer the commodore versions anyway.

[Teralitha]

Well I was gonna buy this to get the old trilogy, but not now.....

[Adventure Square]

The game uses a version of KEGS which was a pretty good quality Apple IIgs emulator, but went without proper maintenance for too long and became unstable.

inXile should update the release to use MESS, which seems to be stable and functional. Essentially they sold a product that has a hard-lock bug. Sad that during the years when this wasn't for sale, I got a better experience just pirating it. (No high moral ground here please, I bought it when it was new for the C64 and the Amiga *both*.) I bought the modern form for convenience and to support inxile, but it turns out to be an inconvenience!

[vorik]

The newly funded Bard's Tale 4 kickstarter will provide the funds for a modern windows port of the original BT Trilogy, written by the original programmers themselves!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/the-bards-tale-iv/posts/1257921

Thus, we have an agreement with the original The Bard’s Tale III programmer Rebecca "Burger" Heineman and her company Olde Sküül to update the games for modern machines! She will be working to make the games run natively, without needing emulators, on PC or Mac. This re-releases will be primarily based on the Apple IIGS versions of the games, along with updated art.