Ok, i installed the GOG version and played the Amiga Emulated game (i have no interest for the DOS version at all).

The music playes like it played on the Amiga (more or less). There are some sound problems, but these existed in the original too (probably when the game started to load more data from the 3,5" floppy disks).
So nothing to fear here, sound is ok.

The gameplay seems at times a bit odd. My uneducated guess is that the game doesn't love fast computers.

The mouse is too sensitive. Solved the problem with my own mouse settings. But it is hard to understand when you are able to click or not. There are many screens which often cover the strategic map. If you click too often or too fast to get access to the strategic / game map (like "nice picture, but i want to play, click-cliick-click, come on, show me the game map, click-click-click") than you can easily start a tourney or a raid, depend of where you clicked on the last screen.

I found it impossible to win a sword fight, not to speak of the tourney. I remember the tourney zo be very hard on all versions of the game, where the game doesn't help you at all to understand when to click, where to click. But as i said: that was true to most of the old versions too.

The battle (conquest / defence) is usually over pretty fast. The higher the odds, the faster. If you face with 10 soldiers an army of 100, than the battle is over before you were even aware that it really had started. All other battles leave you time for one or two clicks to change the strategy, but they still run too fast.

The siege turns out to be much easier than before. You can control the catapult with your mouse. Think about the difference between a digitial and analog joystick, and you understand what i mean.

So my ultimate judgement: the game is not broken, it runs ok, but it hasn't aged very well. Don't forget that you get the Amiga version. That is the version where you can't fortiy conquered castles, where you can't build your own little towers on the map, where you can't move troops to garisson unfortified regions. You can't choose ammo for your catapult (only stones allowed, no greek fire etc. like in later versions).

If you want to support Cinemaware with your purchase: do it. If you want to support Gog, buy it. If you want to get the best Defender of the Crown experience: look out for either the CDTV / CD32 Amiga versions or the Windows remake from 2002 (Digitally Remastered Edition).

I won't play the game again, but i don't whine about the purchase, i would have bought the game no matter how bad it might have been, just to help Cinemaware.

well... they must have done something those 2 years since Barry managed to get Cinemaware interested in gOg... not sure what, though.

I think it is fantatic news that we finally have Cinemaware re-released, and I adore the Amiga versions, but I more and more wish I could give all my monies to the people who made it happen... I had, and still have, high hopes for gOg to secure and rescue the old games, but even with news like this I despair more and more.... 2 frigging years? and you have not even done the legal work?

Nice release, I remember playing this way back, on the Nintendo NES. The current system requirements ( 1.8 Ghz processor? ) are pretty funny, considering what kind of hardware this was originally released on. :P

I'm thrilled too, to see finally a Amiga game on gog! :D Want mooore!

(PS: And, find a solution for the kickstart.rom with Cloanto)

I might have to get this one just for nostalgia purposes. And of course it's only $5.99. :P

Good release, specially with the improved graphics. I'm not a super fan of Cinemaware (never had Amiga or tried an Amiga emulator), but I had tried Defender of the Crown before and recall it was fun.

Tried it for some minutes and my first impression is that none of the versions is running very well.

In the Amiga version the mouse sensitivity is much too high and on the other side some of the gameplay elements (like jousting and swordplay) aren't very smooth and seem to be much harder to control than in the original version.

The PC EGA version on the other hand runs much to fast and while the general gameplay (the part on the map) seemed ok at first, it was impossible to control jousting, swordplay and battles (which were over in a few seconds) as well. Think I can fix it by turning down the cycles in DOSBox, but with the original settings, the game is pretty much unplayable.

I'm still willing to support further Cinemaware releases here on GOG (especially Rocket Ranger), but I hope there will be patches in the future, so the game run smoother in the Amiga version and slower in the PC version (one of the reasons I buy old DOS games here, is that I don't have to spend ours to find the correct DOSBox settings).

I'm fully aware of this.
Take a look at Wings: http://cinemawarewings.com/
or better here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/850516062/wings-remastered-edition/posts/688854

The guys who do this remastered Version are the guys who benefit from Itunes sales of more or less well emulated Amiga-Games. It is this money which enables them to redo the old gems. Wings barely managed to reach the Kicksarter goal. But with the backers trusting them they were able to do the Wings remake. Now they found a good publisher for Wings, and made a deal with GOG too.
I will judge the new Cinemaware on the Wings remake. Not on re-released PC games created for XTs, or emulated Amiga Classics.
:)

Nice release!! Brings sweet memories from Amiga times - Defender and a few other games at that time had nicer graphics than the PC. I'm glad that this game and hopefully more from Cinemaware are coming!! They will be releasing remastered version of Wings soon (they had a Kickstarter campaign a year ago), so 2015 looks very promising indeed.

Very well. No problem, then ;-)

Have you played the demo of the remastered version? You will also be aware the project failed the first time it was on kickstarter, it was successful on the second attempt.

(Off topic, but I don't know WTF GOG is thinking. What the hell does GOG think new users are going to do when they go to gog.com and see a front page that looks like the attached?)

LOL. That's so cute. You think DOS PC's had a sound chip. :-P

I'm sure you've heard of "retro" 8-bit sound. Standard DOS PC's (sans sound card) had 1-bit sound. They had a single I/O pin that the CPU could toggle on/off, and that digital signal (amplified) directly drove the speaker. That's why PC music of the time tended to be single voice, and the voice was a square wave. (You could do multi-voice, but it sucked up more CPU, was harder to program, tended to sound even uglier, and depended on things that weren't standardized such as the impedance of the driver/filter/speaker circuit.) And you generally got a fairly warbly sound because frequently the CPU would be busy doing something (interrupts disabled - thank you BIOS) and wasn't available to drive the speaker, so the waveform would just get stuck for some random amount of time (until the CPU finished whatever it was doing and re-enabled interrupts).

I backed both projects, take a look at Kickstarter if you want to, i use the very same user id.over there.
You'll find there my comments and even my backing amount.
I haven't played the latest beta version. The Demo is pretty old and more or less obsolete as far as i know..

edit:
i just received feedback from Cinemaware and I would like to share this information with all readers of this thread:

"RockLobster is an emulator developed internally, some of our programmers are really experienced Amiga/Motorola 68000 engineers. It was the only way we could find to launch our classic games within a self-contained environment. This emulator keeps getting improved and we will of course release updates to our emulated games being sold as we improve on it!"

I guess that is the informations most of us needed to hear: Cinemaware cares about their emulated games, and they have 68000er experts within their ranks. THIS IS VERY GOOD NEWS, isn't it?
:).