Darklands was famously buggy on release. The subsequent patches fixed most of the problems, but there were a few that still hung around. Stuff like characters' hair turning random colors after combat. And storing stuff in inns producing overflow errors.

I'm curious to know if any of these were fixed. If so, that would easily make this one of the best announcements I've heard all year!

GOG doesn't have access to the source code of the game, thus, if this is something that's been happening even upon release there's little that GOG can do to alleviate the problem. AFAIK.

Well, yes, but I'd still like to hear an official pronouncement.

Kinda waiting to know this, too. I bought it way back when it first came out and enjoyed the game except for all of the crashing. I suppose we'll have our answer within the week, as people buy it and start to play.

It's pretty easy to get through the entire game without even realizing that you have the option of storing anything at in inn.

I could come up with a list of a few more; but most of them are fairly obscure and won't affect newbies: some of them weren't noticed for over a decade. There was a potential problem if you temporarily bumped one of your skills past 99, for example, but a new player is unlikely to run into that. The Yahoo group got into a fairly detailed analysis of some of underlying systems, if anyone is curious.

Do we know what version the GOG version is? And what Patches will work with it? I've not seen this info mentioned here but it could be important.

Firing up my copy, it is 483.07, which is indeed the final official patched version

I own the CD version of the game, bought back in the mid 90's, played it for 100 hours in the last 15 years or so and have had no crashes, no corrupt saves and no bugs that were game stoppers! Maybe I have been lucky!

I don't know, if you don't read the manual, etc I suppose you might be able to break the game, but I LOVE Microprose manuals, so have eagerly devoured it a dozen times or so! I also bought the cluebook and uploaded to Replacementdocs because I knew people would need it because of the sophistication of the game!

Game is stable. the color bug stillhapens but is fixable if it happens due to combat. However the females and al;chemist sprite are still bugged when hired from an inn. A save game editor could fix all these color issues, but none that I know of do anyting but alter stats. One that allows you choose your sprite and colors would be a welcome edition provided it is safe to use :P

There were probably a number of causes for it, but one of the ways to induce the neon hair bug was to accumulate more than 255 items in an inventory. Also, if you exceed that number stored at the inn. And if you did so at the inn, when you go to get them back you probably will have lost some or all of it. Similar thing happens when you have more than 64 types of things in a personal inventory -- items get silently deleted. The attribute bug about exceeding 99 was never fixed. It generally all points to data boundary overrun with insufficient input checking as a leading root cause for those bugs. But Darklands release 7 (483.07) was pretty solid, generally.

Btw- Judaslscariot is correct, GOG does not, generally speaking, develop the DRM out of these games unless it is one that they are directly involved with themselves. They work with the individual publishers and developers who have the rights to them. For many the original source code may not be available anyway. Then it's Remake time!


-mwirkk