|
'The Dungeons of Daggorath' is a video game for the TRS 80
(affectionately known as the trash 80), released in 1982 by DynaMicro. The game is mostly black and
white (although it does have some artifacted red, green and blue colours), and is about
8K bytes in size. 8 thousand bytes! That is less then the size of this 1 webpage alone. Who can imagine how tight and brilliant the code must have been to make such a great game fit in to only 8,000 letters and #s. Some have called it the original Doom or the first 3D shooter. Alot of us who have played it have not defeated it because it is a very challenging game. It requires the players full maximum attention, alertness, and dexterity. It requires that the player be able to keep his witts together in the heat of a hot chaotic battle when all the odds are against him. MANY people have played it and loved it and somehow left it behind and continued with their lives only to have it haunt their memory and leave them wondering if they will ever defeat the evil wizard. The game is such an experiance, even with the crummy sound and graphics that the TRS-80 yeilds, the author has tweaked that slow machine to its limits. It gives one the biggest euphoric rush of addrenaline and actually makes one tense and sit up and sweat and join in, like one is actually there. It actually takes skill. This page is for the dungeon adventurors. Those who survive it are called Adventure Survivors -peace be upon them-. There are thousands of us from all over the world. Dungeons of Daggorath is a powerful world experiance. A PC-Port is now available. Richard Hunerlach has put in a tremendous ammount of work converting the original source code written for the Tandy Color Computer over to the standard PC so that you can play Daggorath in Windows without a buggy emulator. It works great! Mad props goes out to Rick Hunerlach for all of his hard work making this dream come true for so many. Game Internals Richard Hunerlach has studied daggorath's original source code and has written a page explaining the many hidden variables & hidden processes that make Daggorath tick. He even goes so far as to reveal a hidden bug in the code. The Daggorath Internals page is a very exciting resource for Daggorath fans. mspencer.net is now hosting Daggorath discussion forums. These forums are really on fire. Daggorath fans from everywhere are contributing. These discussion forums are definately worth checking out. Mad props to Micheal Spenser, a Daggorath fan, for hosting these discussion forums for us for free & without any anoying advertisements on his server he has running out of his house. The Sourcecode for the Dungeons of Daggorath is now available. Programmers and developers who are interested in porting this classic to the PC can purchase the sourcecode for $95. Many programmers have already done so. Contact Louis for further details. Anyone who wishes to actively take part in the porting process can do so at the new mspencer.net daggorath developers forum which is maintained by the noble Micheal Spencer and moderated by the prestigious Rick Hunerlach. FIRST CONTACT with the authors and creators of the Dungeons of Daggorath have been established!!! The president and founder of the team that created the Dungeons of Daggorath is a brilliant person named Douglas J. Morgan. He headed the programming team. He is a magna cum laude graduate from both Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelors Degree and Stanford University with a Masters Degree, both in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Mr. Morgan was also a National Science Foundation Fellow. He has over 25 years of experience in the computer and hi-tech industry with an early background in programming, design, and project management with companies such as Computer Sciences Corporation, Hughes, NCR, and Hewlett Packard. He founded and served from 1981 to 1984 as President of DynaMicro, Inc., a software and computer game development company known for its development of the national best selling game Dungeons of Daggorath. Mr. Morgan also served as Chairman of Unified Technologies, Inc. He served as Vice-President of Engineering for Hirsch from 1985 to 1989. From 1989-1994, he served as President and Chairman of Stratos Scientific Corp., and from 1995 to 1997, he served as the Chairman of Visual Technologies, Inc. From 1995 to the present he has served as President and CEO of Performance Strategies, Inc. He is also the holder of 5 U.S. Patents relating to networking, security and computer systems design. Douglas has agreed to do an interview with us. Many questions have already been submitted to add to the interview. In time, it will be released here. He has also granted a licence agreement for all emulator developers, programmers or any other person or persons who wish to develop, produce, duplicate, emulate, or distribute the game on the sole condition that they exercise every effort to preserve the game insofar as possible in its original and unaltered form. In this license he also offered a copy of the source code. Yes, it still exists! Previously, in an email, he said: "Its been many years since I and some friends wrote and played Daggorath - but its still one of the things I'm proudest of in my life...I would be happy to provide whatever information I can. It really was quite a project - first to develop the game, then to sell it to Radio Shack, and then to go back and work for an additional 9 months to compress a game we had written tightly in assembler in 16K down to 8K without losing the essential elements that made the game appealing. ..I was thrilled to discover that this game...still resonates with such a cross-section of people." Email from Douglas J. Morgan Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 11:12 AM > > Someone asked that these questions be included in the > interview. They are very good questions. > > 1) have you done work on any other games aside from > daggorath? or worked on any other software? > No, none that were ever produced. We had started on a sequel called "Crisis on Calistar", set in a space station which had been taken over by numerous varieties of aliens. We actually had creature graphics, the story, some of the plot elements and weapons, but the unfortunately got distracted on some big consulting projects and never finished it. To this day that remains a regret. It would have been another great game and shared elements of Daggorath like weapons you had to learn how to enable (flasks), a second station to which you got beamed just when you thought you'd licked the original one (the 4th and 5th levels and the real Wizard), site-to-site transporters that moved you around the station more quickly and effectively, etc. > 2) describe the full nature of all the flasks in the > game.. it seems hale calms the heart and thews gives > strength while abye poisons.. but the manual says the > only way to learn the true effects is by using them in > different situations, could you reveal these > situations for us? > As best I remember, you have in fact identified the primary use of each flask. Of course they could also be used as crude weapons, or be dropped to delay the creatures as could any object. The manual's instructions were just to insure that people worked to incant the flasks and used them to find out how they could help (or kill you...). > 3) what do you think about all the modern 3d 1st > person type games now that owe some gratitude to > daggorath? > I play some of them occasionally. I think the graphics are amazing. But personally I still think the abstraction and visual simplicity of Daggorath - necessitated by technology limitations - when coupled with the realism of the sounds, actually added to the drama and the ability of the game to pull you in. The variable heartbeat was in my opinion the breakthrough innovation because it gave the user a direct physiological que that people responded to physiologically. When the screen heartbeat sped up, people's own heart rates actually increased. > 4) what was the inspiration for the dungeons of > daggorath? obviously lord of the rings by Tolkien, > any others? > Both Phil and I had a love of fantasy adventure, Tolkien certainly ranking high on the list, and the rest just came from many long nights and all-nighters spent brainstorming what would make the game more exciting and fun for us and for others. > 5) how did you code such amazing sound effects? > The sound effects are totally the result of Phil Landmeier's genius. He was the one who first suggested that the CoCo A/D could produce full featured sounds and then developed custom hardware and software to help him play with and refine the sounds. Radio Shack themselves were amazed when we went and demo'd the game for them at what their own machine could be made to do. When Daggorath first came out, the sounds were the feature that put it head and shoulders above every other game on the market, none of which did much more than beep and pop. Copycats soon followed, but it was a couple years before I started hearing games that contained sounds with anything like the sophistication of Daggorath. BTW, I have actually lost track of Phil. He unfortunately had some legal entanglements some years later and pretty much went underground. If anyone knows of his location I'd love to hear from him or get an email address. > 6) daggorath was such a change from the dull, repetitious, > infinite level games that were being produced at the time. > what was the general response among other programmers > at the time daggorath was released? > We actually weren't in contact with hardly any other game programmers and rarely heard anything directly. Most of the feedback we got was from the Radio Shack magazine. At the time it included a Games section which often contained a whole page or more of people's comments, hot tips, questions, notices of game clubs, etc relating solely to Daggorath. It always gave us a lot of satisfaction to see the level of excitement and pleasure the game continued to create. But it was a complete surprise when you (Louis) contacted me recently and I found that people still remembered and appreciated Dungeons of Daggorath after all these years. It was a great piece of my life, I'm happy that it provided similar excitement and fun to others. Again - kudos to my genius ex-partner Phil Landmeier who had the original inspiraton for the game and was a major architect of its features, and to Keith Kiyohara who did much of the brilliant coding and also contributed to our many brainstorming sessions developing the game's structure and features. And of course to April Landmeier, Phil's wife, who did all the artwork and gave us an amazing set of creatures to work with. Great job all. The only extant version of the code is an actual listing, complete with comments, on computer paper. If someone is willing to pay the price of duplicating it at Kinko's and mailing it to them, I will make a copy and forward it. Please let me know if you get any such requests... "Just read over your site with the new additions and really enjoyed it. Made me realize there was something I wanted to add... I want to acknowledge one of our game testers - Aran Rice, who was about 11 at the time and who later became and remains one of my best friends. (He's currently the manager and soon to be owner of Dandelion restaurant in Boulder, CO.) He spent literally hundreds of hours playing and evaluating the game during its development and made a number of suggestions that were incorporated in the final version. (He got paid for his testing - I think his friends thought he had the best summer job in the world.) He also saved our collective asses. Here's the story... About two days before final release to Radio Shack he was playing all the way through the game a last time or two and came to me and said "I'm not sure quite what happened, but the game just froze while I was fighting the Real Wizard..." We went back to look at it and couldn't determine whether it was a power spike that had tripped up the processor or whether something had actually occurred in the game. What followed was a 36 hour marathon with Aran playing the game trying to recreate what happened (naturally, since it occurred on the 5th level, it required running through the entire game every time just to get near where the problem occurred...) and with the rest of us scouring the code to try and see if we'd missed something. It was tough to keep at it and not to just try and explain it away as a hardware glitch, but we couldn't take the chance that we'd overlooked something. Literally 12 hours before we were supposed to ship, Aran made it happen again! Now we knew it was a real bug, and we had a better fix on the circumstances that created it. If I remember correctly - Keith finally psyched it out (some kind of totally obscure counter overflow or reset problem relating to the Wizard that only occurred under specific conditions). We got it fixed, retested it, and send it off to Radio Shack -and to my knowledge, despite the amazing complexity and compression of the game code, not a single bug or error has ever been discovered since in the game. I don't think you all would still be around saying how much you enjoyed the game if after getting all the way to the 5th level and facing the Real Wizard, the game had suddenly frozen on you... And I don't think Radio Shack would have been too happy either... So kudos to all for the quality of the coding, to Aran for his diligence and his last minute heroics, and to Keith for finally solving it. Just another story from the annals of Daggorath lore that I thought your readers might enjoy." Keith S. Kiyohara, the co-creator who did much of the brilliant coding and contributed to the many brainstorming sessions developing the game's structure and features has just contacted us! Email from Keith S. Kiyohara Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 12:16AM ...I have fond memories of working with Doug and Phil on the game. As Doug, recalls in the interview, Phil's work on the sounds was just awesome. If I remember correctly, the sound code occupies all of about 500 bytes or so including the data. If anyone has questions about the code, I'd be glad to answer them. Although it's been 20 years, I can still recall a number of the details. Heh, I spent a lot of time working and reworking the code to make it fit. There is a vanity semi-easter egg, but I never expected anyone to find it since the ROM's were contained in a cartridge. I think we ended up with about 5-bytes left over so I stuck my initials at the very end of the ROM. I think I was hoping that a future archeologist would dig up a old cartridge and have to puzzle out the meaning of those last 3-bytes ;) Thanks for great web page! Two complete walkthroughs for the dungeons of daggorath have been written. WALK-THROUGH version 1.20.01 TOUR published in a coco newsletter in 1985. by Vernon Nemitz. Emulating the Dungeons of Daggorath on a PC with the Return of Coco Emulator This emulates Daggorath the best and is the easiest to get going. The author of the emulating software can not be reached and although the emulator is incomplete, it will play Daggorath. Using this emulator the heartbeat can be heard along with other sounds (unlike the other emulators). There is no option to save but it will load games that were saved on other emulators.
Emulating the Dungeons of Daggorath on a PC with MESS32 Emulator This emulates Daggorath well but is a MESS to set up and get working. A big MESS. The instructions below can help but much tinkering and time is still required. The documentation is lacking as well.
Thank you David Dutton for recomending the MESS emulator. Thank you Tim Lindner for supplying the new Daggorath ROM that runs Daggorath on the MESS emulator better. Emulating the Dungeons of Daggorath on a PC with Jeff Vavasours' Coco II Emulator This emulator crashes easily. The heartbeat often will not work. It is of medium difficulty to install. Its saving grace is that with this one, you can SAVE THE GAME! So if you use this one, save often with different filenames before it crashes again.
About Castles of Tharrogad Castles of Tharrogad is not the real sequal to the Dungeons of Daggorath. It has different creators which explains why it sucks. It is the biggest waste of time. It has huge, complex maps that are so easy to get lost in. There is no action(mouse). You do not have to use your head, but you do have to spend hours using graph paper to figure out where you are. Please! Do not ever play it, or even desire to play it. It is evil. It has nothing to do with the sacred game Dungeons of Daggorath. Several people told me this, but I was hard headed and had to beat it because it is said to be daggoraths sequal, But now I know. HEED MY WARNING!!!!! THARROGAD This is a working copy of 'The Castles of Tharrogad'. Just download the above Tharrogad link and go get a COCO3 Emulator for $25 and you can see for yourself that it sucks. The meaning of "Daggorath" "Stanley M. Jeram" "(the following) is a document from a Tolkien webpage. It talks about the language that Tolkien uses in his novels. It also mentions the word Dagorath, and the meaning, and where it is used in the novels. The meaning is "Battle". I think that the creators of the game probably took that word and added another "g", because the other word, Dagorath, is copyrighted, so they made the word Daggorath. They made a game Dungeons of Daggorath, which means, if you use Tolkien's interpretation, Dungeons of Battle, which clearly makes sense." '...Before the collective plural ending -ath (see below), we would not expect to see the subsequently developed vowel o. For instance, we would expect the collective plural of dagr "battle" to be dagrath (not attested), unaffected by the fact that dagr had later become dagor when it occurred as a simplex (by itself). Yet in UT:395, 396 we find, not dagrath, but dagorath, though there can be little doubt that the latter is a historically unjustified form: R was not final or syllabic in dagrath, so no o would develop in front of it, and dagorath must be formed on analogy with the simplex dagor....' Game Manual & Level Maps The full instructions for the Dungeons of Daggorath. Instructions (copy #1), (copy #2), (copy #3) A note about the ending -do not read if you have not beat the game- Some people have been somewhat dissapointed by the ending. I often hear 'All that hard work and time for a dissapointing ending'. The last ring is very hard to incant and once you do, a new wizard appears with a new symbol on his cloak. The star is the new symbol, the evil wizard had a crecent moon. The line of text says 'BEHOLD!!! DESTINY AWAITS THE HAND OF A NEW WIZARD'. Have you ever wondered about this ending? Now that you have beat the game, you are the wizard with the magic ring. A crecent moon represents a fading moon when the light of truth reflected on to the world of being is slowly fading and being replaced with ignorance. This represents the end of the world. The Star represents a guiding light, or a sun which shines anew the light on to a happy healthy growing planet. Maybe one would have to be a powerful wizard of the mind to finish such a game. Imagine how much many people there must be who could not make it to the wizards list for lack of courage, wits, and determination. I hope for these people that time has given them what they need to come back and answer the calling. The rings, (vulcan, rhime, joule, and the ring of endings) seem to be out of The Ring of Nebulan, or Tolkien. That would explain why they always turned back into gold. I got stuck on a riddle many years ago. I figured that Vulcan rhimed with Tolkein and the answer to the clue was to be found from reading that trilogy, which I did. :)
Other Info Keith Kornegay has taken Daggorath to its limits. He beat the Wizard by going directly to the third level, beating all but the Wizard, then returnung to the other levels to get the rest of his junk. In order to spot the scorpions he looked at his inventory until a creature came. Then he would attack 3 or 4 times (or so), turn around, attack again, turn around, etc. When his heart rate was high he would do this bare handed. It's what we reffer to as "slapping the creature to death". This tactic is hard to master, but very effective. Dave has released a Dungeons of Daggorath Flash site. I like the pictures and design. Thank You all for keeping this experiance alive. Beach lot for sale |