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The Bard's Tale seriesOld BTs without the new one?(14 posts)(14 posts)
(14 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 18, 2013
Is there a way to install only the old BTs? My "game computer" is a little low on storage and I´m only interested in the old BT1.
Posted February 19, 2013
GOG should separate legendary old RPGs and crappy new franchise.I don't want download over 3GB installer for DOS games.
Posted February 19, 2013
This isn't GOG's problem.

The version of bT that they have was originally released on the iPhone, and also the same version released on Steam. The company that produced it updated the interface and included the apple IIGS emulator and games. It's been integrated by the company. Although it should be easy enough for you to download an emulator separately and access the disk images.
Posted February 19, 2013
Btw this version doesn't come with the crappy dos versions, it comes with the superior apple IIGS versions of 1 and 2 and apple II version of 3.
Posted April 06, 2013
Unfortunately the developers archived the .2mg disk images in some non-obvious way.

When running the old games the KEGS emulator built into the main executable is run. The disk images and config files are extracted to a temporary folder and (sometimes, at least) are removed upon exit. There is of course a way to get them while the game is running, it even should be possible to bundle them with a stand-alone KEGS (binary + disk images + config + ROM that comes with them) but I doubt anybody would bother.
Posted October 15, 2013
Vexing >_<

Thanks for explaining it in detail though. ^_^
Posted October 16, 2013
high rated
I got that working yesterday. The disk images are stored in files iibt1.bin etc., these are encrypted zip files. No luck cracking these yet either with a brute-force program or by typing in "Tarjan" (hey GOG, this is a form of DRM!) As mentioned previously however, they do get simply extracted while playing, so you just have to start each of the classic games once from the menu of the main application. On my machine they ended up in my user's "AppData/Local/inXile entertainment/The Bard's Tale/" directory.

To run them with kegs, you'll have to rename (for example) config.kegs.bt1 to config.kegs, and edit it to make sure the paths are correct - for me this involved removing the "%s/" from the strings. The necessary ROM file is in the main installation, "Res/Sys/bttricode".

Once you've got all that copied to a more appropriate location and modified as described, you can just run kegs (xkegs in the case of Linux, haven't tried on Windows). It helps to have run these once from the main game, since it includes a slightly modified version of kegs that displays hints on screen (such as where the character disk is located, s5d2 in the case of BT1/BT2).
Posted October 16, 2013
Somehow, I think "encrypted" files is probably not the kind of DRM that GOG is concerned with. They can't guarantee that every single game they offer doesn't have some encrypted files in them.

Infact quite a few games have encrypted files.
Posted October 16, 2013
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bernds: I got that working yesterday. The disk images are stored in files iibt1.bin etc., these are encrypted zip files. No luck cracking these yet either with a brute-force program or by typing in "Tarjan" (hey GOG, this is a form of DRM!) As mentioned previously however, they do get simply extracted while playing, so you just have to start each of the classic games once from the menu of the main application. On my machine they ended up in my user's "AppData/Local/inXile entertainment/The Bard's Tale/" directory.

To run them with kegs, you'll have to rename (for example) config.kegs.bt1 to config.kegs, and edit it to make sure the paths are correct - for me this involved removing the "%s/" from the strings. The necessary ROM file is in the main installation, "Res/Sys/bttricode".

Once you've got all that copied to a more appropriate location and modified as described, you can just run kegs (xkegs in the case of Linux, haven't tried on Windows). It helps to have run these once from the main game, since it includes a slightly modified version of kegs that displays hints on screen (such as where the character disk is located, s5d2 in the case of BT1/BT2).
How did you make kegs work on Linux? There are some vague instructions about making some ROM images (http://kegs.sourceforge.net/), which I didn't understand at all. Also, did you build it from source?
Post edited October 16, 2013 by shmerl
Posted October 17, 2013
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shmerl: How did you make kegs work on Linux? There are some vague instructions about making some ROM images (http://kegs.sourceforge.net/), which I didn't understand at all. Also, did you build it from source?
Built it from source, there are no packages for my distro. You don't need to make ROM images since The Bard's Tale includes them (the Res/Sys/bttricode file).
Posted November 16, 2013
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Baggins: Btw this version doesn't come with the crappy dos versions, it comes with the superior apple IIGS versions of 1 and 2 and apple II version of 3.
Please don't take this as me being a jerk, but what is superior about it? Graphics, I'm guessing? Sound?

In the DOS version, going through doors is almost instant, not a 2 second delay. And in combat, by pressing the arrow keys (and space bar, IIRC) you could skip past all the delays. I couldn't find anything to do so in the Apple version.

Is there somewhere to change the settings on the Apple version? I can't imagine how many hours it would take to play through the 4 ranks of 99 barbarians in this one...

If there's just something I need to tweak so I can complete the game sometime before I die of old age, I'd like to give the superior version a try.

Thanks.
Posted November 17, 2013
Thorfinn there is some bugs in the dos version. Including several classes that don't function right, and apparently some leveling bugs, and enemies that don't function correctly. Apparently not using their correct skill sets.

This is covered in other threads.

It was a broken port.
Post edited November 17, 2013 by Baggins
Posted December 29, 2014
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bernds: I got that working yesterday. The disk images are stored in files iibt1.bin etc., these are encrypted zip files. No luck cracking these yet either with a brute-force program or by typing in "Tarjan" (hey GOG, this is a form of DRM!)
Please excuse the necro, but since I haven't been able to find this information posted elsewhere, for future reference, the zip passwords are:

02iibt112 for iibt1.bin
02iibt212 for iibt2.bin
02iibt312 for iibt3.bin
Posted March 20, 2015
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bernds: I got that working yesterday. The disk images are stored in files iibt1.bin etc., these are encrypted zip files. No luck cracking these yet either with a brute-force program or by typing in "Tarjan" (hey GOG, this is a form of DRM!)
avatar
drennan: Please excuse the necro, but since I haven't been able to find this information posted elsewhere, for future reference, the zip passwords are:

02iibt112 for iibt1.bin
02iibt212 for iibt2.bin
02iibt312 for iibt3.bin
Thanks! Great find.
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The Bard's Tale seriesOld BTs without the new one?(14 posts)(14 posts)
(14 posts)