Explore Minecraft: Dungeon Keeper Ancestors

I think almost everyone has heard of Minecraft. But perhaps not everyone has seen one of the great games from which Notch took his ideas - I say Dungeon Keeper. I'm not going to retell Wikipedia about what a game is, for it seems to me that it’s better to see once than to hear or read 100 times;). If the video above is a little interesting for you, you can buy the game , ask your friends for a disc or try to find an image of Dungeon Keeper Gold on the Internet (the most complete version of the game). Since the game was released in 1997 under Windows and under DOS, there are 2 startup options: under Windows in compatibility mode with Windows 95 or DOSBox. In general, I would not recommend trying to run it natively under Windows, although there are, let's say, KeeperFX , which should fix some compatibility issues.

Make sure your disk image contains music.

Interestingly, the original CD is the so-called Mixed Mode CD , in which the first track is recorded data (ie, the game itself), and all the remaining tracks are musical accompaniment. If you try to make an ISO image from such a CD, you can either get only the first track, or several .iso-files (the first link is for the query "iso mixed mode cd" ). In any case, this format will not suit you for a disk image (if you want to play with music): it will be very problematic to mount several .iso files as one logical partition. Therefore, for example, a disk image should be in the format .cue , which is devoid of the disadvantage described above and allows you to make images for Mixed Mode CD.

Mount .cue in DOSBox

If you launch Dungeon Keeper via DOSBox, and you have a .cue image, then I have good news for you: DOSBox supports mounting such files. To do this, type the following command after launch (or put it in the [autoexec] section of the configuration file):

imgmount d /path/to/image/DKGOLD.cue -t cdrom

Game setup

After you have installed the game, the keeper.exe and deeper.exe executable files should appear in the C: \ KEEPER folder (only if you have installed the Deeper Dungeons add-on that is included in Dungeon Keeper Gold) - they both require an inserted disc D: \ in order to start the game. In principle, the usual Dungeon Keeper does not check the installation directory too carefully, so you can copy the missing files from the disk and specify the path to the installation in KEEPER.CFG as “C: \ KEEPER \”. But then you lose the musical design, and the music in the game is very good.

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If you set the game in DOSBox, then by default you will have the reduced resolution mode enabled. The game has 2 resolutions - high (by default in windows-version) and low (dos-version). You can switch between them by pressing Alt + R directly during the game. I also recommend that you spend some time setting DOSBox so that it performs aspect-correction, since the game is designed for 640x400 mode, but with a 4: 3 aspect ratio (most older CRT monitors support this mode). Otherwise, the game will not look like the authors assumed :).



If you want to play Deeper Dungeons (and even for some fragments of Dungeon Keeper this is relevant), then you may notice that scrolling is tied to the frequency of the processor, and therefore some levels can not be chosen. This is where DOSBox comes to the rescue: you can lower the speed of the game to the desired level during the selection ( DOSBox keys ), and then put it back to the maximum so that the game goes more smoothly.

Passage of the game in Russian

Some time ago, I already wanted to write a topic in Habré about this game, but at that moment I decided to save some more information and useful material on this topic. But anyway, then I uploaded a video on Youtube that I was preparing for this article , and he had already collected about 2 thousand views. It made me think about the fact that maybe this topic would still be interesting to other people. Therefore, I decided to make not just a review of the game, but its complete passage, and I have already published the passage of the first 16 of the 20 regular levels and the passage of 1 bonus level , and for this bonus level I could not find the passage elsewhere (and not only YouTube, but in the textual passages of the game, this level is marked as impossible to pass). The total duration of the video uploaded by me is more than 9 hours, so in one evening you will hardly be able to play the game;). If you include the passage of the remaining levels, it can get about 15 hours of gameplay (at a fairly fast pace;)). If we consider that there are several bonus levels and the whole Deeper Dungeons addition, consisting of 20 additional (and very difficult) levels, you can imagine for yourself how huge this game is.



I really hope that if you like Minecraft, like me, then you will also really like Dungeon Keeper, since this game, IMHO, is simply a masterpiece and still looks no worse than some modern games. But all this, of course, in his spare time.