Alternate Reality: The City by Philip Price for Atari 800

[Dan0]

I've got some miscellaneous shots of some Elfin Chain and some rare baddies.

 

 

Really was too bad I found this after getting the Crystal Plate... would like to have seen how good it was.

 

 

The Assassin was no match for the flamesword and crystal plate!!

 

 

Don't even bother with these guys unless you have the flamesword... magical weapons don't even scratch them.

 

 

I actually think Knights are tougher, but it was cool to run into him.

[bfollett]

DanO, what did you do to get your Str up to 255? It seems out of whack with all your other stats.

[Dan0]

The fabled boxing with trolls strategy by the person who started this thread (Xebec's Demise). You can get a point every time you have completed 255 successful attacks, tricks, or charms. Theoretically you can get a Str, Int, and Chr of 255, but it moves much faster for the strength then the other two.

 

Just carry your trusty longsword or battleaxe and once you encounter a troll switch to bare hands and parry. Some trolls will die quickly anyway, but some will stay alive long enough to get 5 points of strength off of them. Best of luck!!

[bfollett]

Ahhh, I remember that now. It's been so long since I played the city. I know in the dungeon, with all its bugs("features") it's easy to max most of your stats, but I forgot about that prolonged battle feature in the city. Maybe it's time to give the city a run again.

The fabled boxing with trolls strategy by the person who started this thread (Xebec's Demise). You can get a point every time you have completed 255 successful attacks, tricks, or charms. Theoretically you can get a Str, Int, and Chr of 255, but it moves much faster for the strength then the other two.

 

Just carry your trusty longsword or battleaxe and once you encounter a troll switch to bare hands and parry. Some trolls will die quickly anyway, but some will stay alive long enough to get 5 points of strength off of them. Best of luck!!

[Dan0]

If you do, make sure to let us know how it goes!

[Xebec's Demise]

 

Without a doubt the toughest thing in the game to do is to find fine dragonskin clothing of the same color... this is the best I've been able to do.

 

Interesting. Clothing is something I would like to experiment more with considering how much relative effort and complexity Philip Price put into it and shops. Clothing has to have the most extensive variations of any game objects. There are all kinds of combinations. And, yet, I don't think I've really ever had much more than armor and a loin cloth!

 

 

I've got some miscellaneous shots of some Elfin Chain and some rare baddies.

 

 

Really was too bad I found this after getting the Crystal Plate... would like to have seen how good it was.

 

Did all other games spell "elven" wrong? http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elfin I've never seen that type of armor before. I've had the Magical Flame Sword and Magical Crystal Plate though. So you have no idea how good the Elfin Chain is? Was it Magical?

Edited July 30, 2012 by Xebec's Demise

[+kheller2]

Has anyone considered building a MineCraft version of the city (I've done a Doom version) ? I'm watching my kids play the Xbox360 version of MineCraft and the rain in the game made me miss the fun of the AR series.

[acrin1]

Has anyone considered building a MineCraft version of the city (I've done a Doom version) ? I'm watching my kids play the Xbox360 version of MineCraft and the rain in the game made me miss the fun of the AR series.

 

Yes but I don't think it's progressed any further. There are some AR City Minecraft screenshots on my AR remake forums below:

 

http://arproject.50.forumer.com/ar-craft-t2184702.html

 

My son plays Minecraft all the time. I'd love to see your Doom version of the City if you still have a copy.

 

Acrin1

www.crpgdev.com

[axh174]

Has anyone considered building a MineCraft version of the city (I've done a Doom version) ? I'm watching my kids play the Xbox360 version of MineCraft and the rain in the game made me miss the fun of the AR series.

 

I managed to dig up the AR Doom mod files Karl was talking about. There's the main level *.wad file and the sound effects *.wad file. They can be found here:

 

Level: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31359678/arcity/arcity.wad

Sound: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31359678/arcity/ars.wad

 

To load them in a Doom, type "doom -file DirOfWads\arcity.wad DirOfWads\ars.wad" where DirOfWads is whatever path\directory you store the files in.

 

Once in the game, skip to Episode 1, Mission 5 (type "IDCLEV15") and take a look around.

 

Bear in mind that while the City in its entirety is present, it exists in mostly a beta state. Certain one-way passages couldn't be implemented the way they were in the original AR and limitations in the number of sectors a level can have forced joining certain doors together.

 

Either way, it's fun to roam around and lots of fun to play through Doom with the sound file =)

[acrin1]

 

Either way, it's fun to roam around and lots of fun to play through Doom with the sound file =)

 

Thanks for posting this. I'll try it out. It's about time I fired up Doom anyway!

[WestofHouse]

I'm very late to the party but I'm just getting back into A8 computing for the first time in over 20 years and AR was one of my favorite games of all time. I'm hoping to find a disk copy of it at some point. Nothing on Ebay at the moment. I've read that it can be a bit of a pain to run it via SIO2PC. I'll still give it a shot once I get my SIO2PC. If I can get it working it will be worth the effort.

[Tin_Lunchbox]

It'd be so fine if one of our geniuses got this on to a flashcart. Apparently, Phillp Price' anti-copying magic is still potent after all these years though.

 

The disk-swapping and long load waits never much helped the game, and it would be nice to reduce them which would probably be the case with a flashcart.

 

I've got Ultima IV on flashcart, so that one was evidently feasible to transfer over, albeit no doubt with much effort.

[Rybags]

The custom SIO routines add an extra layer of complexity to any media shifting efforts.

 

What would be nice with this game and some other multidisk games, simply change to use one large disk rather than several small ones. Then it'd work with all the virtual floppy devices like SIO2xx and be easier in emulators.

The added bonus of such reverse engineering is that the knowledge gained would make transfer to flashcarts closer to reality as well.

[acrin1]

I'd love to play a version of the City where I could use an emulator snapshot feature to save my game - works fine for the Dungeon but not the City.

 

I believe the City writes data to some of the disks during play which if you use emulator snapshots leads to you getting the "Entering" and then immediately" Leaving" a shop problem. Whether this is copy protection or required by the game I'm not sure.

 

Best of luck with the flashcart version.

[Rybags]

The disk is used for temporary storage for in-progress games. Shutting down the emulator then copying the images then using them when resuming should work.

 

You'd want to do your snapshot such that there's no disk activity at the time - entering an establishment and doing the save once menu interaction for it is possible would be a good way.

[WestofHouse]

Someone was selling a copy of this on Ebay complete with box and manuals, and I missed it.

[Xebec's Demise]

Someone was selling a copy of this on Ebay complete with box and manuals, and I missed it.

 

Some silly prices on eBay:

 

$4.99 COMMODORE 64 REALITY THE CITY ALTERNATE INSTRUCTIONS (instructions only!)

$43.68 ORIGINAL Reference Card - Alternate Reality the City - Atari ST (just the reference card only!)

$45 ATARI Alternate Reality The Dungeon Manual and Map 400 800 800XL 130XE XE XL (map only!)

$49.95 Alternate Reality the City Commodore 64 Datasoft computer game C64 Data Soft (complete Commodore version seems to be better priced)

$249.99 VTG ALTERNATE REALITY Datasoft RPG ATARI 400 800 Video Game Software RARE 1985 (disks only!)

$373.71 City Map of Xebec - Alternate Reality the City - Atari ST (map only!)

[Xebec's Demise]

I've never heard of this before.

 

Alternate Reality the Dungeon Revisited by Penny Ormston

http://ar.memso.net

 

67MB Download.

[pixelmischief]

I consider myself ridiculously fortunate to have City complete, in box, and Dungeon shrink wrapped.

[pixelmischief]

Check this out. In the docs for City. I never knew this until just now.

 

"To prevent anyone else from using your character, use the control key for a Secret Name. Example: You want a character named Morag with the secret name Morag Giant. When promoted to name your character, type Morag. Press control and type Giant. Press return. Only Morag will appear on screen."

 

Super cool.

[Xebec's Demise]

I consider myself ridiculously fortunate to have City complete, in box, and Dungeon shrink wrapped.

 

Did you just list your shrink wrapped Dungeon for sale for an extremely unreasonable price? Or just a coincidence?

 

$599.99 Alternate Reality The Dungeon Atari 400 800 XL 1987 RPG Phillip Price NEW SEALED

 

That is not going to sell.

[pixelmischief]

Coincidence. I am never going to sell it. Ever.

[eegad]

I'd love to play a version of the City where I could use an emulator snapshot feature to save my game - works fine for the Dungeon but not the City.

 

I believe the City writes data to some of the disks during play which if you use emulator snapshots leads to you getting the "Entering" and then immediately" Leaving" a shop problem. Whether this is copy protection or required by the game I'm not sure.

 

Best of luck with the flashcart version.

 

 

I play the city via emulator and use snapshot to save the game. You are correct - some data is written to the game disks upon loading the game. The key is that you have to save the image of the game disk (i think disk 2, side 1) as well as the "snapshot"...then the next time you want to play, load that saved/altered disk 2 side 1 into the emulators virtual drive instead of the "original" game disk. then load the snapshot. at least that works fine for me on the old Atari800Win emulator. Last time I really played around with my Atari emulator stuff (a year ago?), I know that the then-current version of Altirra had just added snapshot ability, but I never got around to trying Ar City with Altirra and snapshots.

 

And as far as flashcart version, that would be the ultimate. Someone here was playing around with it a few years ago, and I also dug into it and was trying to get it to work. It loads up, you can start a new game, walk around for a while, but inevitably the game crashes within a few minutes. I tried playing with the disassembly to figure it out, but gave up after a while. Seemed to me from what I recall that somehow things get scrambled in memory and after a few encounters or entering buildings, the program tries to jump to an area of memory where the display list resides and that's all she wrote. Damned if I could figure out how/why that happened though, but it happened consistently every time I tried to follow the program flow.

[eegad]

I've never heard of this before.

 

Alternate Reality the Dungeon Revisited by Penny Ormston

http://ar.memso.net

 

67MB Download.

 

Very cool....never heard of that before either. Anyone else know anything more about this - like who exactly Penny Ormston is and is there any further development of this project going on? (also - if anyone has been playing this for a while - does anyone have a map drawn out for it? or a cheat to get the mapstone or location spell??)

[Xebec's Demise]

Another crazy price!

 

$530 ALTERNATE REALITY (The Dungeon) - ATARI - NEW IN BOX - CULT !

 

He says it has a, "pathetic soundtrack." Maybe he doesn't know what pathetic means?

 

Where are they getting these ridiculous prices from? Did one actually sell for this much a while ago?

 

I did a search of sold items and found most used City games selling for between $40-100 depending on version. But there was a used Dungeon that sold for $200. Maybe that is what they are going off of for the new sealed ones.