Ask me about LOOM

Title Screen

LOOM came in a large box with six 5.25" floppy disks or three 3.5" floppy disks, the User's Manual, the Book of Patterns, a red transparent filter to read the copy protection symbols, and an audio cassette containing the audio drama, a trade in offer for the opposite type of floppy disks and an upgrade offer for the Roland MT-32 sound upgrade.  Also, you probably got a catalog or even The Adventurer #1 with your copy, depending on when you bought it.

Full Box Contents (courtesy of TheFloppyDisk.com)

So LOOM is an example of "the whole package" presentation of PC games.  The boxes were often stuffed with disks and manuals and other "stuff", making those big boxes somewhat justifiable.  To experience LOOM "whole" requires you to go through those items, one by one, until you get to the disks themselves and install the game.

Loom Island

As has been mentioned before in this blog, there are three major versions of LOOM, the PC disk version with 16-color graphics, the FM Towns CD version with 256-color graphics, and the PC CD version with 256-color graphics.  Of all the versions you could play, I would recommend the PC disk version.

Loom Sanctuary

The PC disk version has several advantages over the other versions.  First, it can be played with just about any computer and graphics adapter except Hercules (unofficially Hercules can play the game with the SimCGA program). Second, the game supports all the common sound device options of its day, the PC Speaker, Tandy, Ad Lib MSC, CMS Game Blaster and Roland MT-32.  Third, even with the Roland MT-32 upgrade, the whole game will take up no more than 2.15MB.  Fourth, if your vintage computer lacks a hard drive, you can swap floppies.  Fifth, loading times are non-existent with the disk version in most systems with a hard drive, but if you have to play with a CD, you will have the frequent short wait while the CD seeks a track or section within a track.  Lastly, the singular vision of Brian Moriarty is completely encompassed here.

Crystalguard

The floppy disks are well arranged for disk swapping, even for the 5.25" floppy disks.  Disk 1 contains the main executable and the introductory screens.  Disk 2 is primarily for Loom Island, Disk 3 is for the Glassmakers, Disk 4 for the Shepherds and the Dragon's Cave, Disk 5 for the Blacksmiths and Disk 6 for the Clerics and end-game.  The 3.5" disks combine Disks 1 & 2, Disks 3 & 4 and Disks 5 & 6, further reducing the need for swapping.   However, it was not intended that you swap disks if you wanted to use the Roland MT-32 music on the upgrade disk, which came in both sizes.  You were supposed to install the game to a hard drive to enjoy the MT-32 music.  I suppose LucasArts probably thought that if you were rich enough to afford an MT-32, you were rich enough to have a hard drive in your PC.  Savegames with the Roland MT-32 patch cannot use another sound option.

Shepherd's Meadow

The audio drama is on a compact cassette and can be found on both sides in stereo.  The drama runs 29 minutes, 9 seconds.  Side One is encoded in Dolby B NR (noise reduction).  Side Two is encoded with Dolby S.  Dolby B was prominent from the 1970s as a noise reduction system and widely supported, while Dolby S was a much newer (1989) noise reduction encoding system that required special support with high end cassette playback devices.  Dolby S recordings could be played back on Dolby B-supporting devices, but there would be less benefit.  Dolby B could be played back on low-end cassette playback devices that did not support any Dolby encoding, but there would be less benefit.

Dragon's Cave

LOOM is not unique in containing a cassette with spoken audio for adding value to the game.  Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer had a tape of Yeager talking about his career and giving aviation advice. Corruption had a tape where you could hear two versions of a conversation, the full conversation and a conversation edited to frame you.  The President is Missing contained audio supplements to the game.  None of these games had a full-cast audio drama to give the background for the story.  LOOM used professional voice actors and recorded them at Skywalker Ranch.  They also recorded them reading their lines together instead of separately as is the more common practice.  The script for the audio drama can be found on pages 32-38 of the LOOM Hint Book.

Forge Interior

In the standalone PC disk versions, the copy protection requires you to look for the correct guild symbol and then click on the four notes given for one of the four patterns.  There are twelve guild symbols and four patterns for each guild (throw, beat treadle and rest).  Unlike most games that will boot you to DOS if you fail the copy protection, LOOM will allow you to play the game in Demo mode, at least to a certain point, and you cannot save or restore a game.  If you have the version of the game contained in the LucasArts Classic Adventures collection, the copy protection has been removed and you will never see the copy protection screens.

Cathedral Balcony

Much of the visual attraction of LOOM can be attributed to one man, Mark Ferrari.  Ferrari did the front cover box art as well as all the backgrounds for the game and contributed to the animation.  LOOM has some of the most beautiful backgrounds ever done for a 16-color PC game.  The work of this one man was redone by four artists in the CD versions, with varying results.

Shore of Wonder

The musical inspiration for LOOM goes to an unimpeachable source, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Moriarty loved the ballet Swan Lake and incorporated certain movements of it wholesale into LOOM.  Even the little music which is not directly taken from Tchaikovsky's work is adapted from it.  While I cannot see LOOM as being a computer game adaptation of the ballet, the ballet's idea of humans turning into swans is an influence on the game, which features the same thing.  Every guild has its own theme taken from the music to the ballet.  Here is a chart of showing the themes in LOOM and their corresponding place in Tchaikovsky's ballet :

Loom Theme	Swan Lake Name	Location in Swan Lake	Notes
Overture	Scène: Moderato	Act II, Numbers 10 & 14	Roland MT-32 Only
Opening/Loom Island	Pas de Trois: Intrada/Allegro	Act I, Number 4, Movement 1
The Elders/Closing	Danse des Petit Cygnes: Moderato	Act IV, Number 27
Crystalguard/Glassmakers	Danse des Cygnets: Allegro Moderato	Act II, Number 13, Movement 4
Meadow/Shepherds	Pas D'action	Act I, Number 6
Forge/Blacksmiths	Pas de Trois: Moderato	Act I, Number 4, Movement 4
Cathedral/Clerics	Pas de Trois: Andante Sostenuto	Act I, Number 4, Movement 2
Final Confrontation/Dead Ones	Scène: Moderato	Act II, Numbers 10 & 14	More of an arrangement

LOOM may have been intended (depending on when Moriarty commented on the matter) to be the first part of a trilogy of games or the trilogy was left open as an option.  The second game was going to be called Forge and feature the adventures of Rusty Nailbender to try and save his guild.  The third game was going to be called The Fold and follows the adventures of Fleece Firmflanks to try to restore the world.  However, Moriarty and his team were busy working on other projects and the  drive was not there at LucasArts to complete the trilogy and eventually the moment had passed.  However, there were guilds and drafts mentioned in the written materials and the game which were not used in LOOM, perhaps the sequels may have used some of these ideas.

Guilds mentioned in the Book of Patterns or in the game and not featured include :

Seismologists
Embalmers
Undertakers
Florists
Career Politicians
Assassins
Miners
Umbrella Openers
Dancers
Psychotherapists
Shepherds
Organists
Nannies
Conductors
Firefighters
Statisticians
Bookbinders
Woodcutters
Vintners
Mages

There are twelve guild symbols used for the copy protection :a quill pen in an inkpot, a crook with a sheep, a spinning loom, a pair of scissors, a drinking goblet, a toy horse, a T-square, a three-pronged staff, an abacus, a hammer and anvil, a wavy line and a magnifying glass.  I would suggest these represent Career Politicians, Shepherds, Weavers, Tailors, Vintners, Toymakers, Architects, Clerics, Statisticians, Blacksmiths, Seismologists (or Mages) and Psychotherapists.

Drafts mentioned in the Book of Patterns but not used in the game include :

Summoning
Tongues
Tremblor
Shrinkage
Desire
Waterproofing
Folding
Confusion
Warmth
Aphrodesia
Extinguishing
Blessing
Rending

The drafts use the musical notes across a scale from C-C'.  You can use sixteen drafts in the game.  Two drafts, Opening and Transcendence, do not change from game to game, but the rest do.  All the other drafts have three possible note combinations.   However, you only need to write down only eight drafts to get to the end of the game.

Bobbin Threadbare

The first game was designed to be completed.  It was not made so difficult as to require an obligatory hint book purchase or be left on the shelf and forgotten in frustration.  This may explain why LOOM's hint book is rather more difficult to find than other LucasArts' hint books.  The puzzles in this game have solutions that make sense and the clues are easy to grasp if you pay attention.  At times the game will give you hints if you are not doing something quite right.

Mother Hetchel

LOOM's can be put in an unwinnable state if you forget to transcribe a draft or transcribe it incorrectly and cannot go back to the point where you can hear it again. Backtracking is limited in this game.  Some puzzles have more than one solution as well.  The Expert mode will really test your note identification abilities, there are no visual cues usually present.  It does reward you with a neat scene toward the end of the game.

Elder Atropos

Did you know that the end credits change depending on the hardware you are started a game on the disk version with?  You will see one of the following lines in the end credits, depending on the sound hardware you used :

Roland Stereo Soundtrack by George Alistair Sanger and David Warhol
AdLib™ Soundtrack by Eric Hammond
CMS Stereo Soundtrack by Eric Hammond
Tandy Soundtrack by Dave Hayes and David Warhol
IBM PC Soundtrack by Dave Hayes and David Warhol

Hetchel as a Swan

And a little later in the credits :

Tandy Edition by Aric Wilmunder (if running the game on a Tandy 1000 computer), otherwise
IBM PC Edition by Aric Wilmunder

Master Goodmold

LOOM is one of the first PC games where a player can really feel that he is driving the plot.  Earlier games were content to let you go off and explore with the general plot making an appearance from time to time, but LOOM is a game that is squarely focused on its plot.  As the protagonist, you drive the story and your actions have consequences.  The game is rather intimate in that you have fairly frequent interaction with the other characters in the game.  The more important characters have animated portraits and distinctive dialogue to give them personality.

Fleece Firmflanks

LOOM can be seen as something of a Greek tragedy.  Bobbin has been destined from birth to cause chaos to erupt in the Pattern.  No matter what he does, he inevitably is the spark that causes the Pattern to be torn open and allow for Chaos and the Dead Ones to invade the world of the living.  The Elders tried to stop chaos by trying to banish Bobbin to the Shore of Wonder, but were thwarted before they could act.  Ironically, Bobbin's mother, who brought Bobbin into the world to forestall the coming of chaos, prevented the Elders from possibly forestalling chaos.  Finally, no one really wins in LOOM, Bobbin and the Weavers fight Chaos to a draw at best or make a retreat.  Bobbin, who is still a seventeen year old "child" has to pay the price for his destiny by Transcending well before his time.

It is no accident that the Elders are named Atropos, Clothos and Lachesis, which are the names of the three Fates of Greek Mythology.  Like the Greek Fates, who dictate the destiny of every mortal from birth to death, the Elders control access to the Loom, which contains the pattern of all life and death in its threads. The Greek Clotho uses a Distaff and Spindle to spin the thread of life.  The Loom Clothos is the least hostile of the Elders to Hetchel.  The Greek Lachesis measures the thread of life with a rod, while the Loom Lachesis is the one to denounce Hetchel, implying her thread has reached its end  Finally, the Greek Atropos cuts the thread of life, indicating the doom of the person.  Elder Atropos from Loom is the the one who casts the draft of Transcendence on Hetchel, symbolically ending her physical life.

The Dragon

As everybody knows, the PC CD version added fully spoken dialogue to the game.  They put all the voice acting, music and sound effects on one large CD audio track following the game data.  The CD audio track is 54 minutes and 39 seconds long.  Everything was lumped into one CD track because the CD standard only supports 99 tracks, which is insufficient for all the cues in this game.

Rusty Nailbender

Why didn't LucasArts just digitize the speech like it did with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle?  That would have allowed them to include a great deal more speech, but this would have come at the loss of quality.  Indy and Day's speech is encoded in 8-bit and no greater than 22.050KHz. LOOM's speech is at 16-bit and 44.1KHz.  Moreover, Indy and Day require a Sound Blaster for speech playback while LOOM only requires a CD-ROM drive.  In 1992, CD-ROM drives and Sound Cards were still expensive, and it was not guaranteed that someone would own both.  Moreover, at this point LucasArts' voice acted games were still using MT-32 and General MIDI for music.  On LOOM, while the music is not always distinct from the dialogue, it sounds much better than the MT-32 of the disk version.

Master Stoke

Despite the loss of much of the more humorous dialogue, the CD voice acting is professionally done.  In addition, LucasArts managed to obtain most of the voice actors who had done the audio drama for cassette.  This was during a time when much of the voice work and acting for CD-ROM games was done on the cheap by the programming team and the company staffers instead of professionals.  To its credit, LucasArts never really went down that route.

Bishop Mandible

The redone artwork for the portraits is exceptionally well-done.  Unfortunately, you will almost never see it in the PC CD version.  Because the dialogue was shortened, those portraits would have gone by too quickly.  They are seen normally in the FM Towns version.  There are a pair of animated cutscenes unique to the PC CD version, but they look rather ugly and out of place compared to the rest of the game.

Cob

The PC CD version has an unfinished feel to it.  No one bothered to recolor the distaff to bring it up to 256 color standards, even though a recolored distaff was in the FM Towns version.  Less defensible is the fact that the item closeups have not been redone either.  Neither the FM Towns nor the PC CD corrected this leftover from the PC disk version.  Nor did they update the graphics when you look into the crystal spheres in these versions.

Rusty Nailbender as a Ghost

What about the FM Towns version?  The FM Towns computers are very rare and expensive, even the FM Towns Marty consoles are hardly common, even in Japan.  Obtaining an authentic FM Towns hardware experience will be very expensive.  While UNZ does a serviceable job emulating the system and has English-translated menus to make things easy to get running, emulation only gets you so far.

Lady Cygna Threadbare

One better known issue with the FM Towns version is that there are two sets of music tracks.  While both tracks were composed with synthesizers, the first set of tracks sound a lot more orchestral than the second set.  Yet it is the second set that loops after both sets are played.  They should have axed the second set altogether, it is totally inferior when it comes to reproducing the music of Swan Lake.

Chaos

One lesser-known issue with the FM Towns version is that the aspect ratio is not correct.  The FM Towns version takes the artwork designed for a vertically stretched 320x200 resolution and adds 40 lines of black on the bottom of the screen without adjusting the graphics themselves.  On a PC, most people stretch their monitor's height so that the visible edges of the screen come close to touching the monitor bezel.  The end result makes the "spheres" in the game have a nearly spherical ratio in either the PC disk or PC CD versions. Without aspect ratio correction, the crystal spheres in the FM Towns version look like ovals.

Loom FM Towns

Loom PC CD (Aspect Ratio Corrected)

The last  issue with the FM Towns version is that they did not convert the item closeups to 256 colors, just like with the PC CD version.  It rather takes away from the fantasy when you see a symptom of "get it out by Christmas".

Anything else you want to know?

Getting Started in System Shock

Welcome to my DEATH MACHINE!

System Shock is a classic from the DOS gaming era, but trying to play it can be, well, something of a shock.  If you are used to DOOM and its simple controls, you are in for quite the learning curve.  However, once you get a feel for the game, you should be able to appreciate what it was trying to do.  While it has been unavailable legitimately for many years outside of eBay, GoG is now offering System Shock Enhanced Edition, which includes the original CD-ROM Enhanced version as well as a Windows executable to run the game on modern systems.  I have beaten the game multiple times and really love it.  In the spirit of the times, I offer this guide to get the most out of the game.

Installation and Settings

Getting the game running in DOS or DOSBox is no particular chore.  I am assuming you are using the Enhanced CD-ROM version, most people do over the inferior (but original) floppy version.  For any system, I highly recommend that the CD-ROM drive is D.  That will save many a headache trying to figure out why the game is not loading. After you mount the CD, the game is installed with ORIGIN.BAT (not INSTALL.EXE) on the root directory of the CD.  Installation is straightforward, and I recommend choosing the Roland SCC-1 for music and the Sound Blaster 16 for digital audio.  Even if you only have the built-in General MIDI capabilities of Windows, the music is still better than Adlib.  If sound or music is not working, try the manual setup.

Running the game in Windows 9x is a bit more tricky.  You can always run it in real mode DOS, but that requires you to exit Windows and load mouse and CD drivers and maybe sound drivers.  If you want to run it within Windows, it can be done.  Right click on CDSHOCK.BAT and go to Properties, then the Memory tab.  Under the memory tab, put all the memory value for Conventional at 600 and the DPMI Memory at 16384.  Click on the Protected box, then Apply.  You then start the game with the MS-DOS shortcut.  Even though the game will play fine on my machine, once I click on the checkbox to get rid of the window, it will crash my system hard.

For a good challenge, start the game with the default "2" settings for each category, and when you enter the game you will immediately be presented with a screen full of stuff and information boxes.  The first thing you should do is to hit the Space Bar key, then the Esc key, go to Video and increase the resolution to 640x400 or 640x480.  Even 320x400 is better than the default 320x200.  However, if you are running this game on a 486 spec machine, 320x400 is the best resolution/performance option you will likely achieve.  You can set the number of audio channels to eight, which is advisable if you are running the game on a Pentium or better.  Neither the enhanced video modes nor the extra audio  channels nor the voice acting is available in the Floppy version.  Everything that I talk about hereafter applies to both versions.  I use DOSBox at a fixed 100,000 cycles for my preferred resolution of 640x400.  If you use max cycles, you will find the mouse cursor exceptionally jerky when moved.

Movement Controls

Today, everyone uses WASD to navigate through a first-person perspective game.  In System Shock's time, that convention had yet to be established.  Unfortunately, the game did not allow you to remap keys. Instead, you use ASDX to move.  The S and X keys move forward and backward, but the A and D keys turn left and right.  System Shock was made before the days of mouse-look, which essentially eliminated the turning movement.  Strafing left and right is done by the Z and C keys.  You can run by holding down the Shift key or always run by pressing the Caps Lock key.  (DOSBox may require a few key presses of the Caps Lock key before emulator will register a change to the key's state.)

System Shock truly expanded the scope of your ability to move and interact with the environment.  The Q and E keys allow you to lean left and right, and W will return your posture to the center.  The R and V keys allow you to look up and down and F will put your head movement back to the straight ahead position.  This is important because System Shock is much closer to a true 3-D environment than DOOM.  Finally, G makes you squat, B puts you on your stomach and T lets you stand upright.  Sometimes this is necessary to squeeze through low-height corridors and tight spaces.  Having such freedom was unprecedented, but so much of this has been simplified by the mouse look and extra mouse buttons.  The last key set is confusing because it is the top key that puts you back to normal instead of the middle key.

If you forget what any key does, just hit ? and it will bring up the Help Screen.  Alt-O will give you a description of the items in your HUD display.  You can click the Full Screen box or Alt-V to play the game in Full Screen with a minimal HUD, but sometimes even the minimal HUD will get in the way and you will sometimes use an item by mistake where the full HUD would keep you from doing so.

The mouse controls both cursor by which you interact with objects on the screen and the aiming and firing of your weapons.  A single click on an object will give you a description of the object, a double click will grab the object.  You can place the object in your inventory by dragging it into one of the bottom panels.  You can throw the item by right clicking, and the higher the item's icon is on the screen, the farther you will throw it.  A double left click will allow you to search corpses, both human and enemy.

The first weapon you get will be a pipe, and it is easy enough to swing by right clicking.  When you encounter the first enemies, you may have to look down to get good hits in them.  You will have to look up to destroy security cameras with the pipe and it can be a bit of trial and error.

Soon you will find a projectile weapon.  They shoot where you aim the cursor.  Many of the guns have more than one type of ammo available, and you need to observe which type works best against which type of enemy.  Regular rounds are best against organics or cyborgs, but teflon rounds work better against robots.  EMP weapons are useless against organics and gas or tranquilizer darts are useless against robots.  Energy weapons are usually good against anything and do not waste ammo.  Instead, they use energy, as their name implies, and finding recharge stations becomes very important.

HUD

In-Game Help Display

You will not get far in this game if you do not master the HUD.  The first thing you will notice are the two rows of arrows on the top left of the screen.  They represent your Health and Energy Level.  If the former disappears, you die.  If the latter disappears or gets too low, you cannot fire energy weapons or use software that consumes energy like Shield.

There are three panels on the bottom, and the left and right panels, called the Multi-Functional Displays have identical functions.  The middle panel, the Inventory Panel, has four buttons, Main, Hardware, General and Software.  Main and General are the most important.  On either, you can select the weapon or item by clicking on the name.  You can activate a grenade or a patch or a battery or first aid kit by clicking on it twice.  You can throw an item away by right clicking on it.  You only have a certain number of slots for weapons and items, so you may need to make some hard choices.

Would you like to play a game?  Just don't on company time

The left and and right MFD Panels are mostly informational.  They can show Weapon, Item, Automap, Target and Data.  Weapon will show you any settings you may be able to adjust with the weapon and also to unload and reload a weapon.  If you have more than one type of ammo available, you can choose which type to load.  Item will give you a visual identification of an item, and it can also show you how many clips of each type of ammo you have if you click on the name of a gun on the Main panel.  Automap is a feature you will be using almost constantly.

The Side Icons control various functions.  As you find the hardware, you can install a Sensaround unit to look behind you, a Turbo Boost to go faster, a Lantern to light up dark places and a Shield to help absorb damage.  Most of these upgrades will consume energy.

Most of the functions on the HUD can be selected with hotkeys as the following diagram shows for the major functions :

The Data Reader can be accessed by clicking on the E box on the left of the Side Icons.  Email comes from living people like SHODAN and Rebecca or to update you on the status of the ship itself.  Logs can be picked up on the station from its former inhabitants and give you information, clues and background to the plot.  Data is only found in Cyberspace and will appear when you leave it.

Data Reader Log List

Cyberspace

Finally, there is Cyberspace.  You enter Cyberspace when you double click on a large multi-pronged jack.  Each level usually has one or two of these jacks.  In Cyberspace you have full 3-D movement.  You move forward by pressing the S key, and you turn up, down, left and right by pressing W, A, D, and X.  Q or Z rotate your position left and E and C rotate you right.  It is not dissimilar to how flight simulators control a plane.  You only have a limited time to explore Cyberspace.

Cyberspace is a series of rooms connected by corridors.  Most corridors will propel you one way and your movement is limited.  You are looking for spinning cubes, usually found in the rooms, which contain helpful software or data.  You will need to find a weapon called a Pulser quickly to defend yourself against Enemy Software.  You will be able to spot enemy software because its always large and hostile looking and will approach or shoot at you.  Shoot at it until it disappears.  If you take too much time or damage, you will be ejected from Cyberspace with lower health and high fatigue.  Also avoid the two squares connected by a short cylinder, they act like land mines.  Eventually you should find a circular exit.  Before you do, you should try to collect all the spinning cubes in the area and activate switches that look like two triangles and a rectangle between them.

The red spinning rectangles contain pulser or drill, yellow has c-shield software, purple contains data you can read with your E-Reader and blue is for decoy or recall software, and green is for amusement software.

Cyberspace showing software and enemies

Sometimes, you will see an item with a blue polygon outlined around it.  That is a security barrier and needs to be destroyed using the Drill software.  You can choose your software in the Software tab, the only part of your HUD available to you in Cyberspace.  You can upgrade your Pulser and Drill software whenever you can.  The red crosses can be collected to restore health, which is called System Integrity in cyberspace.  The amount of damage you receive is influenced by the C-Shield software. You can and should upgrade your Drill and Pulser and C-Shield software to the highest levels possible.  Cyberspace rewards searching everywhere for hard to find nooks and corridors.

Mouselook

At some point in the 21st Century, someone finally decided to hack System Shock to add mouse look support.  Prior to that, the only option other than using the keyboard to do things like lean and look up or down was to use the Logitech Cyberman mouse.  The Cyberman was a mouse that was raised above its mousepad on a stick to allow for six-degrees of freedom movement.   In System Shock, the roll movement is used for leaning and the pitch movement is for looking up and down.  Unfortunately, the Cyberman gained a reputation as one of the worst controller peripherals of all time and six degrees of freedom controllers (6DOF) never really caught on until arguably the Nintendo Wii.

The mouselook patch can be found here : https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=1719.0.  I used the older patch, which gives you the ability to set a different resolution in game and remap keys by editing a CFG file.  You press the E key to activate the mouselook mode and WASD to move forward/back and strafe left/right.  You need to deactivate mouselook mode often to bring items into your Inventory Panel and to use items located in your inventory panel, so its less than a perfect solution.

Practical Advice and Hints for Playing your First Game

The first real object of the game, once you have grabbed your initial items and restored your health and energy, is to find a Sparq beam.  The Sparq beam will be your weapon of choice for Levels 1, 2 and R.  It can kill all the common enemies on these levels in one or two fully charged hits.  If you follow the ducts past the first logic puzzle you find, you will come across an area with many bodies and it will be there.  Using the Sparq beam will make life easier when you deal with the Cyborgs who have ranged weapons.  It is also useful when you need to light up a dark place.

Nah nah, you can't catch me!

This game has an automap, be sure to explore every nook and cranny for items and enemies to kill for items. Your HUD display can show you a section of the map and you can enlarge the map to fill the screen.  You can and should leave notes on the map, especially where the Power Stations can be found.  You should use rooms near an elevator to store equipment you cannot fit in your inventory.

Level 1 Complete, most levels are similarly complex

Do not waste ammo on Humanoid Mutants, they respawn on level 1 and you will need the ammo for the Minipistol and the Dart Pistol for later levels, mostly the Groves.  If you go back to the healing suite before reaching Level 2, the game will delight in throwing multiple Humanoid Mutants at you on the way to and at the healing suite.  Hit the Energy Station near the entrance to Beta and Delta quadrants before making the trip back there.

After you acquire a Sparq beam, the next goal for Level 1 is to find the Cyborg Conversion chamber and flip the switch that turns off Cyborg Conversion.  The chamber is in Beta Quadrant and there are quite a few Cyborg Drones and Cyborg Assassins between the entrance to Beta Quadrant and the Conversion Chamber.  They shoot projectiles, so you should get in plenty of practice in leaning around corners to fire at them.  Cyborg Assassins act silently, unlike most enemies who make noises indicating their presence.  If you suddenly start taking damage and there is no enemy sounds about, chances are you are dealing with a Cyborg Assassin, so run until you figure out where it is hiding.

Berzerk patches can come in handy when crowd control is necessary

Once you find a Cyborg Conversion Chamber and turn Cyborg Conversion off, finishing a level is usually a matter of time.  It should be your first priority to find the Chamber upon entering a new level.  You can die as often as you like and you will be brought back to the Chamber and be resurrected.  On one occasion, you must activate the chamber or you will be caught in an inescapable death trap after performing a certain plot critical event.  Be warned that not every level has an accessible conversion chamber.

Once you reach the Research Level, Level 2, you should have fully mastered the HUD and the Control System.  Level 2's Cyborg Conversion Chamber's Switch can be a tad tricky to find  It is in the western part of the Level, in a room that looks like the top half of a heart.  Level R is your next stop, but you won't be able to see everything on your first trip.  It also has the second of two healing units in the game, but the puzzle to open its door is tricky.  While you can get Level 2 to an almost respawnless state, Level R will respawn Hoppers, those annoying blue enemies that shoot at you.  Remember that often you can hit enemies by exploiting angled walls and height differences and they won't shoot back until its too late.

The logs and emails will often give you clues to the plot events if you want a spoiler-free game.  Write down any important numbers you may find.  Logic Probes can be used to bypass some of the more tricky puzzles, including those trial-and-error wire puzzles.

When you get to Level 3, you may feel overwhelmed by invisible mutants, which respawn and take many hits to kill.  The Sparq beam is no longer going to cut it here.  You need not spend much time on Level 3 initially.  If you find a Laser Rapier, you can cut them down in two hits as long as you have some energy.  It is near an Elevator and is very powerful, provided you can get close enough to an enemy to use it without dying.  After you do what you can on Level 3, you can choose whether to go to Levels 4, 5 or 6.  I would suggest taking the levels in their numbered order, but really the rest is up to you.  Good luck, you'll need it!

Adventures in Porting - US PC Game Developers and the FM Towns

Released in 1989, the Fujitsu Micro (FM) Towns home computer was an amazingly powerful gaming computer for its time.  It used a 386DX CPU running at 16MHz with 1MB of RAM (upgradeable to 2MB). It could display many resolutions like 640x480 with 256 colors and could support 15-bit color at 320x240 and lots of sprites.  It came with 1x CD-ROM drive, providing redbook audio support in addition to the 4-Operator FM Synthesis 6-channel YM-2612 chip (also used in the Sega Genesis) and 8-channel 8-bit Ricoh RF5c68 PCM chip.  It also came with 2 HD floppy drives and could be connected to an external hard drive.  The Operating System, FM Towns OS, was a Windows-like GUI operating system.  A bootable only version of the OS was freely available to applications developers so their software could boot in the CD drive without needing to load the OS.

Of course, this powerful machine was available only in Japan, where it competed with the Sharp X68000 and the NEC PC-9801 series.  Of all the three system lines, the FM Towns was the closest, hardware-wise, to the IBM PC compatible machines in the west.  Fujitsu came calling to US companies looking for software to showcase their new machine, and several companies were interested.  Most licensed their games to be ported in Japan, but a few put in something extra when it came to the FM Towns.

LucasArts

LucasArts was quite enthusiastic when it came to the FM Towns, porting many of its classic SCUMM adventure games to the system.  Unlike other companies, they did not ship their code off to Japan for a local company to convert their game.  Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was their one game where none of the advanced features ever found their way back to the US.

Zak's FM Towns version featured a 256 color graphics update of the 320x200 Enhanced PC version.  There was a great deal more music, with the CD containing 23 CD audio tracks for background music throughout the game.  The original C64 version had music two tracks and none of the other versions had more than that until this FM Towns version.  Most of the tracks consist of ambient noise and sounds appropriate to the scene with new age music themes popping up from time to time.  The sound effects also received an upgrade thanks to the more capable sound hardware.



























































Zak is easily accessible to non-Japanese players because it kept the English language text.  Not all games would use Japanese text.  However, all of LucasArts' games had a Japanese text option, but in Zak the graphics for the player characters were altered to give their eyes a larger, more anime-style look.  The effect is more creepy than cute and the faces of the non player characters are not altered.

Next we turn to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure.  This game shares the graphics from the 256-color PC VGA version, which was floppy-disk sized.  There were a few 16-color graphics left over in the PC VGA version that were fixed in the FM Towns version.  However, there is an error in the FM Towns version where some of the tiny character sprites are in 16 colors instead of 256 colors as they were in the PC VGA version.

The audio in the PC 16 color or 256 color version supported nothing better than the Adlib, but the FM Towns version's music received a huge upgrade.  The music appears to be taken from the film's soundtrack, so it really cannot get much better, quality-wise.  Not every scene and area in the PC version used music, but there are 14 tracks on the CD devoted to John Williams' recordings.

 After Indy comes Loom.  Here the graphics were updated to 256 colors, except for the icons that appear when you click on objects.  Unlike the PC version, the graphic for the FM Towns' distaff uses a palette not strictly limited to the 16 color IBM CGA/EGA palette.

Whereas the PC CD version of Loom devotes its CD audio space to speech and sound effects, the FM Towns version of Loom devotes it to music.  There are two sets of eight tracks used for music in the game, and they correspond to the music in the PC floppy disk version.  The first set of tracks (1-8) sound like they were recorded with a real orchestra.  The second set of tracks (9-16) were clearly composed with a synthesizer.  When music starts to play, the track from the first set plays, then the second set plays.  Unfortunately, after that the inferior second set track loops.  Whoever thought that was a good idea?

Interestingly, of all the boxes, only Zak and Loom used artwork that was not found on LucasArts' own PC boxes.  Indy's box art and the rest essentially follow the LucasArts' PC boxes.  Zak included a translated version of The National Inquisitor and collectible cards featuring the playable characters.  Lucas or Fujitsu went the extra mile and had the Audio Drama from Loom done by Japanese voice actors.   Loom and Zak took much longer than the other games to be converted due to their 16-color origins.  Indy for the FM Towns had been completed within two months of the PC 256-color version, while Loom took a year to be released after its 16-color PC version.

Since all the dialogue is kept from the PC floppy version and the portraits have been redone in 256 colors, some consider this to be the definitive version of the game.  The cutscenes and animations lost in the PC CD version are kept here.

With the Secret of Monkey Island, the inventory item graphics were in 16 colors compared to the 256 color pictures of the PC CD VGA version?  They were not planning 320x200 EGA 16-color support for the CD version in 1991-1992.  So why bother to create 16-color versions of these graphics?  My theory is that they were in 16-colors because the lower part of the screen is using an overlay mode.

Essentially put, many PC ports to the FM Towns would use the nearest analogous mode, 320x240. However, kanji text requires a high resolution mode.  I believe the SCUMM engine games used 320x240 with 256 colors (the mode is capable of 15-bit color) for the main graphics window and a 640x480 overlay for the text on the submenu and the spoken dialogue. This gives the kanji 16x16 pixels for each character, but the mode only supports 16 colors on the screen.  This minimized the performance hit compared to everything being drawn in a 640x480 resolution.  An unfortunate side effect is that the inventory graphics in SoMI and the closeup graphics in Loom would have to be in 16 colors.

Zak takes advantage of the extra resolution compared to its PC versions.  It essentially uses 432 of its 480 lines for the text-based portions of the game.  This allows the player to select three additional rows of inventory objects over the PC versions.  The rest of these games do not use the extra space and just leave back letterbox-like bars there.  While Loom puts the bars on the bottom of the screen, the rest of the games center the game in between top and bottom bars.  This tends to suggest that these games were made with a 1.6:1 aspect ratio in mind when most PC games, including LucasArts, really were not.

The Secret of Monkey Island looks, sounds and plays like the PC CD version.  This is when LucasArts' ports no longer have substantial value over their corresponding PC versions.

LucasArts also released Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, but Fate corresponds to its PC CD version and MI2 to its PC version, which was not enhanced for CD. Fate's Japanese text option uses the English voice acting.  Neither CD has CD audio, making them rather uninteresting from a PC perspective.  There are some palette changes, but otherwise they play the same.  LucasArts's iMUSE music engine was too complex to be handled by CD Audio at the time.  The only addition FM Towns' MI2 has over the PC release is a Japanese language option.  These games boot to a language selection screen instead of the FM Towns OS. Compare Loom with Monkey Island 2's boot options :

Origin Systems

Another interesting FM Towns port is that of Ultima VI: The False Prophet.  The major CD enhancement for this port is the addition of voice acting.  There is both English and Japanese voice acting, each is used for the appropriate language choice.  For the English voice acting, employees from Origin Studios and their relatives were used. Richard Garriott voices Lord British and Shamino, for example.  The samples are stored on the CD in files, so the resulting quality is 8-bit.  The sound effects have taken a major improvement over the PC speaker sound effects in the PC version.  This particular port was overseen by Origin.  They were probably planning to use their efforts to release an Enhanced PC CD-ROM version, but that never happened.

For Ultima VI, the 640x480 mode's extra height allows for an extra box.  Typically, this has icons to allow the user to select the English or Japanese language language, save or load a game and return to the FM Towns OS. Uniquely of the games I have sampled, Ultima VI allows you to select the language by either an executable or in the game.  When in dialogue, this allows you to select any conversation choice revealed by the dialogue without typing. Of course you can still type anything into the box to ask the character.




Origin also ported Wing Commander to the FM Towns.  The FM Towns version includes both the expansion packs and you can select either expansion pack from the main menu, unlike the PC version.  The CD audio is used for the music, while the sound effects are substantially upgraded.  Unlike Ultima VI, there is no voice acting and selecting between English and Japanese is done via executables.  Interestingly, there are three executables for each language choice, one for each drive you could use to save your progress.  In the FM Towns, Drives A and B are floppies, Drive C is for the internal ROM and Drive D is for an external hard drive.

Wing Commander II requires an installation to a hard drive, and like its predecessor it uses the CD audio for music.  Ultima Underworld uses it for voice acting heard in the introduction in the PC version.  The samples are obviously of higher quality than what floppy disks could hold, but after you finish the intro, the PC and the FM Towns should play identically thereafter.  By this time, the early FM Towns with their 386D X/16 CPUs were not quite up to the task of running these games, so a faster system was recommended.

Origin also ported the first three games in the Ultima Series as the Ultima Trilogy.  The CD audio is used for fanfare.  Richard Garriott recorded a short introduction in his Lord British voice that also plays as an audio track.  Each game has an introduction with pictures accompanied by text and one of the tracks playing.  Character creation for each game is accompanied by another track.  There is in-game music for all three Ultimas, but it is completely original.  The sound effects are digitized as well.  The graphics are completely redone in high resolution and the games may feel a bit off compared to the Apple II or PC versions.  These conversions were not done in-house by Origin.

Additionally, Origin ported Ultima IV and Ultima V to the FM Towns, but they are much less remarkable.  Ultima IV uses Ultima V's PC tiles and has two CD audio tracks with renditions of Towns and Stones.  These are played during the special introduction and main menu, otherwise music is played through the internal FM chip.  Ultima V has CD audio tracks for the Ultima Theme and Greyson's Tale, played through the special introduction and the main menu.  Otherwise Ultima 5 uses the tiles from the PC and similarly plays music through the internal FM chip.  Again these conversions were not from Origin.

For the Ultima ports, Origin used the built-in YM-2612 for music.  LucasArts did the same for MI2 and Fate of Atlantis.  In these games, the Adlib music is roughly ported to the FM Towns chip.  When I mean rough, I mean in the sense that the results are inferior to the original despite the fact that the FM Towns' YM-2612 (which is also used in the Sega Genesis) is mostly superior to the Adlib's YM-3812.

Sierra Online

Sierra only just dipped its toe into FM Towns ports.  It released King's Quest V for the FM Towns apparently before it did for the PC.   It also released Roberta Williams Mixed-Up Mother Goose which also is cut from the same cloth as the PC CD version of the game.

King's Quest V for the FM Towns has Japanese and English voice acting.  The default voice selection is Japanese, you can change it to English by clicking on the mountain button in the settings menu after you start a game.  Unfortunately, you won't be able to hear the English dialog in the introduction in this version.  Restarting the game returns you to Crispin's house, not the Title Screen.  All in-game text in this version is in English, even when the Japanese language option is selected.  No version of the King's Quest V CD version contains text for the speech or a text option.

This game uses the YM-2612 sound chip for music but does have digital sound effects.  The music does sound like it was ported from the Adlib, so do not expect much.  While the PC CD versions play a low fidelity recording of the MT-32 music for the introduction and finale of the game mixed with the voice acting in the audio file, the FM Towns version plays the FM music and the speech is not mixed with anything until the FM Towns mixes the two audio sources.

There is an early and a late version of King's Quest V for the PC CD-ROM, the major difference between the two being the processing applied to the voice samples.  In the early (December 1991 file date) version, there is minimal processing, leading to crisper sample playback but it gives very pronounced sibilant sounds.  The later (April 1992 file date) version suppresses the sibilant sounds and some of the background noise, but the overall output of the samples is noticeably more muffled.  The voice samples for the English and Japanese voice options in the FM Towns version generally follows the later PC CD version, although NewRisingSun observed there is more reverb for the narrator's voice samples.

Interestingly, while the Icon Bar from the FM Towns version is identical to the PC version, the FM Towns uses the black and white mouse cursor icons from the floppy version.  The PC version uses multicolored mouse cursor icons when run in DOS and black and white mouse cursors when run in Windows. Unfortunately, another thing the FM Towns shares with the Windows version is the ugly stretching algorithm used to stretch 320x200 graphics into 640x480 graphics, leading to lines that have uneven heights.

FTL

FTL released Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back.  Both have CD audio music, but Dungeon Master II does not appear to have an English language option.  All the tracks for Dungeon Master and some of the tracks for Chaos Strikes Back were released for Dungeon Master: The Album, which could be purchased via mail order as stated in an advertisement booklet in the PC release.  These pieces were done by Western musicians.  Otherwise they look and sound like their western originals.  I must note that Chaos Strikes Back was never released for the PC.

Dungeon Master II was also released for the FM Towns two years before it was released for the PC. Dungeon Master II came on CD and floppy for the PC, but the CD does not appear to offer any advantages over the floppy.  The same CD audio tracks on the FM Towns CD can also be found on the Sega CD version of the game.