Were they done by NWC? Just wondering because wikipedia says that the older games were re-released in the late 90s with newer titles but they never released these updated versions of 1-3 on PC/Apple. Was this because they were done 3rd party?

I think you're referring to the console versions of the original games coming out in the 90s, long after they were released on personal computers.

Given that all the names involved in the ports are Japanese, I'm somewhat suspicious that they weren't owned entirely by NWC and thus the rights to them did not come along with the original games.

Some of the console ports are buggy.

In Might and Magic 1 NES, Black Locusts are especially nasty. In the PC version, they are fast and get 10 attacks, but each attack does only 1 damage. for a total of 10 max. (10 damage, while painful early in the game, is at least survivable.) In the NES version, however, they will hit for 255 damage, downing one of your characters. Even worse, when this happens, a bug will give the enemies another round of attacks, allowing the Black Locust to kill another of your characters, resulting in a rather unfair party wipe.

Might and Magic 2 SNES could be considered broken (even worse than, say, Bard's Tale 3 DOS). For instance, a damage spell resisted by an enemy will do 50 damage instead of none (even if the spell isn't capable of doing that much damage). If an enemy frenzies, all the enemies' attacks will miss (judging from a video of the player fighting Cuisinarts). I have also read that apparently instant death spells always work. Another video showed the player stuck in the inn with the game locked up. (The Sega Genesis version isn't nearly as bad.) Also, Max HP potions give you only 2 HP (instead of 512).

Might and Magic 3 SNES has an issue where some of the stat boosts in the Arachnoid Cave are set incorrectly, making it difficult to raise one of the mental stats. Also, in that version, you can get your AC to underflow, allowing you to get over 250 AC by equipping items such as wooden rings.

In other words, you might not want some of these ports.

MM 2 had resistance overflows in all versions iirc (one of LPs has a mention of this and some other overflows here).

All ports were official except one Japanese version of MM 2 on SNES (screenshot can be seen here). There was "real" non-Japanese port of MM2 on SNES as well. As you can see, Japanese version doesn't even look like anything close to MM 2.

Actually, I just watched another video of MM2 SNES, and there is yet another way in which the game is broken; spells like Teleport and Lloyd's Beacon work everywhere. This means you can just teleport past anything in your way, making the game even easier. Disintegrate + Teleport pretty much breaks the entire SNES version; if you can cast those two spells then it doesn't matter if you are underleveled or are missing the Admit 8 Pass.

Also, what's the point of Etherialize when Teleport works everywhere?

Ok, but if they were official couldn't they have fixed some of them?

Looking at that link that was just posted, even porting the Amiga version of 2 over to DOS would've been a nice upgrade. It looks like they did something similar to that with Mac.

In general, it's not too surprising that later versions of a game get improvements. Of course, if you want those improvements, you could certainly try out the Mac or Amiga versions. I certainly don't know what bugs they might have though.

As for why they didn't re-release the dos version, the sales figures would probably be projected to be too low to bother.

Looking at youtube the UK actually got a SNES version of MMII (whereas we just got part III) and the graphics are even better than the Amiga/Genesis version. Also, the music is actually really nice!

But read my post about how broken that version is. Disintegrate and Teleport completely break that version of the game.

Judging from youtube videos, Might and Magic 3 SNES plays a lot more slowly than the DOS version.

One bug in many versions of MM2 (including SNES, Genesis, and Macintosh) is that enemies that partially resist spell damage have the damage cut in half twice. This doesn't happen in the DOS version. (Another difference: The Mega Dragon never uses its breath attack.)

Feel free to give it a try, though I can't really see the gamepad input scheme being a lot of fun.
If you do try it, I'd like to hear how it goes.

My main thought, though, is that when I choose to play Might and Magic from the 1980s, I'm not doing it for the graphics.

True... but if the same game is available with a nicer face would prefer it. Unfortunately as dtgreene points out the SNES there are flaws.

Personally I don't mind a few bugs especially if I can get around them by not abusing them if I choose. What dtgreene says about what the point of etherialize w/teleport but I've said the same thing about the location spell in MM2. Some stuff is just useless.

What makes the SNES version not really playable for me is how sllllllow the turn left/turn right inputs are. I can get past the scrolling to select commands and do battle (and actually prefer it since you don't have to remember all the spell #s) but navigating is a serious chore. Oddly the forward and backward movement is totally smooth, just the turning is sluggish. Also, the game won't remember your marching orders and will always seem to reset it to defaults after every battle or going to the inn to save, no matter how many times you exchange party members order! I'm not really sure if it even matters because I don't know if these versions even have melee vs range ranks. Shame because the graphics are nice and unlike the Genesis the music is a plus.

Breezing around on DOSBOX makes me wonder if this game's greatness for its time would've been hampered by poor performance on original machines? Someone noted in the other thread how they had to constantly swap discs back and forth on their C64 version. Was this the same across all versions back then? I didn't get a computer until about '94 (a Power Macintosh - boy what a piece of crap!)

Everyone has different preferences/tastes. Honestly, I'm more curious about the capabilities of the machines at the time than anything else.

For BOOK 1 it seems that excluding NES the western version was only Apple II, DOS and C64 (no Amiga yet) Looking at the screenshots of the different versions on Mobygames (http://www.mobygames.com/game/might-and-magic-book-one-secret-of-the-inner-sanctum/screenshots). ..

...it is hard to say what looks 'best.' What was considered the strongest system of the three? My own observations are

-that the original Apple II seems to have more colors, but is the most pixelated (of course they all are)

- the C64 seems to have smoother look in some shots (like the starting door are solid browns rather than tinier pixels), less colors than the Apple II, more than DOS but the colors all look more dull and faded

- DOS seems to be not as smooth looking as the C64, although moreso than the Apple II. The colors seem to be less than the other two versions but the colors you do have are much brighter than the ones on the C64. Not all the screenshots are equal though for this version. Some say (CGA). The specs for the DOS version says CGA, EGA, Hercules. No video mode is shown for C64 and Apple II simply says Hi-Res (hah)

I've tried experimenting with these but changing dosbox config from anything other than svga_s3 yields no picture. From what I've read Hercules was a higher resolution mode but had no color.

In addition to how it looked, I would imagine that the DOS 3.5" Floppy version was the best experience in terms of playability?

Thanks to anyone who feels like sharing their original experiences running these back in the 80s.

The Apple ][e graphics modes were just not very impressive. That said they're miles ahead of the Apple ][ / ][+ 6-colors only (orange, purple, blue, green, white black).

They're pretty chunky though.

The C64 has a pretty muted non-bright palette. A couple of reddish colors that tend towards brown. A muted green and a bright green. Several grays. It lends itself to some things decently (commando), but the bright colorful world of Might and Magic becomes "duller", as you point out.

The DOS resolution should be higher than Apple II or C64, but maybe it's not well-used? I certainly haven't looked into it. I'm talking about the EGA implementation here, as the CGA version isn't worth discussing with a 4-color fixed palette of awfulness (you can have cyan and purple OR red and green). DOS games then typically had to support several graphics cards as the market was pretty split.

Oh but weird, there's a claim that MM2 supported MCGA? This was eventually folded into VGA, but was a 320x200 256-color display mode. If so, the MM2 I got from GOG certainly doesn't *look* like MCGA. I'm guessing this list is actualy jus the set of video hardware the game can *work* on. It's possible to treat both VGA and MCGA as if they were EGA with only some very slight differences in result.

If interested, here's a brief overview of those various modes: http://devtidbits.com/2008/03/16/dosbox-graphic-and-machine-emulation-cga-vga-tandy-pcjr-hercules/

The Amiga has pretty much the same resolution (as typically used) as DOS/EGA, but it's typically 32 out of 4096 colors instead of 16 out of 64, so there's just much better choices for drawing specific things. Genesis & SNES are a little lower resolution but a lot more colors.

Yeah, I tried getting the Hercules config going in MM1, but didn't have any love. You'd have to configure the game (eg mmset.exe) to tell it what kind of graphics adaptor you have. And you'd have to configure dosbox to pretend to have a hercules card, because they aren't VGA-compatible. I tried this and got weird results and decided I didn't care enough to dig deeper. Anyway, yes hercules was monochrome. Not grayscale, just black and white. The resolution was high enough though, that the low-resolution graphics programs of the day could be displayed with different patterns of dots representing color intensity. It's generally not a good choice for games.

Strangely the article shows what can happen when you incorrectly run a CGA game using DOSBOX default "machine=svga_s3" but that is what the default config is here on GOG and it seems to work fine (when setting it to CGA infact, does not work at all).

I can't make any sense of much of that link that you sent after CGA. The CGA Composite vs CGA RGB makes no sense to me because whenever I've seen Composite vs RGB in terms of console games composite looks washed out and blurry while RGB looks crisp and sharp... but in the King's Quest example shown there that is not the case.. The RGB just looks like...a mistake.. like it was done with pointillism.. the composite CGA looks how that game should (IMO, I've never played it).

Now with Hercules... well, with any of them... were these inherent in the systems themselves or could be 'added on' ? Computers were so damn expensive were earlier adopters really left out in the cold? I'm taking from that article that Hercules (since it says 3rd party graphic standard) was an module or add-on that let people get high res graphics from their old MDA PCs/monitors so they could enjoy game offerings without having to jump to a CGA or better?

Also is there a difference between PCjr and Tandy really? Clicking on the Video GATE Array link to Wikipedia brings up Tandy Graphics Adapter. My takeaway is that TGA was the same tech as the VGateArray except that TGA was backwards compatible with the many CGA only games, whereas PCjr was not? And EGA was superior to CGA but inferior to Tandy?

I find it interesting but very confusing and by the time it gets to VESA I'm totally lost. Hah!

Oh, and Mobygames says that MMII supports Tandy - but changing it from svga_s3 to tandy in the config results in the game starting up, with sound, but the screen simply displaying "4KB Allocated."

The post is showing (among other things) the subtleties of how CGA was used with composite displays.
MM1 does not use the composite display tricks.

Independently, MM1 should be configured to use EGA with mmset.exe. The improvements are not drastic, but you do get wonderful improvements like the existence of the color yellow.

For MM2 SNES, you could try not to abuse the bugs, but it can sometimes be tricky. Also, doing so disallows what would be legitimate strategies in other versions. For example, Disintegrate is very useful for its ability to do 50 damage to 3 enemies for only 6 sp (with a chance of instant death as a bonus), but if you want to avoid exploiting a SNES version bug, you need to not use it. Even worse, if you are using attack spells and one of them is resisted, you have just exploited a bug that lets you get 50 damage from even lower level spells. Yes, that version is that broken.

For MM1 NES, it's not as likely that you will exploit a bug by accident. However, you do need to be aware of Locust Plagues. I would advise something like this if you play the NES version.
1. Get a physical attacker to 18 Speed as soon as possible. This will give you a chance to attack the Locust Plague (and hopefully kill it) before it gets a turn and wipes out your party.
2. When exploring areas where Locust Plagues spawn, be careful when in combat. If you ever see a Locust Plague in the back, stop attacking front row enemies and focus on destroying the Locust Plague instead with spells and ranged attacks. You do not want the Locust Plague to ever get a chance to attack, or else it will be game over.

Also in MM1 NES, even if you're not fighting Locust Plagues, anytime one of your characters goes down, the enemies get a free round of attacks. This means that you will need to be stronger than you otherwise would to beat harder enemies.

In summary, in MM2 SNES, trying to avoid exploiting bugs is just not feasible. In MM1 NES, you need to specifically adjust your strategy to account for the fact that enemies exploit bugs against you.