Fountain of the Gods

[Gunstar]

Has anyone else ever played this game? While looking for an old classified ad for another thread, I came across a classified ad for this game (January 1989 Antic) that I had circled years ago but I never inquired further, but being a fan of Telengard and Dunjonquest games I decided to see if the game had been archived at Atarimania, and sure enough, there it was! I downloaded it and will try it out later, but I suspect it's a rather unknown title to many Atari users, so I thought I'd share.

 

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-fountain-of-the-gods-_2063.html

[+MrFish]

I've heard of it -- and have it in my collection of ATR's -- but haven't played it much beyond a casual look.

 

I remember hearing about it in this thread: Good RPGs?

 

[Gunstar]

Ah, yes, a brief mention from @Lord Thag . He seems to like it...I missed that one while the thread was going on, or at least forgot about it before I went searching. I'm glad I ran across it again.

Edited December 9, 2020 by Gunstar

[Mclaneinc]

Fountain Of The Gods (The) [v3.51] [Side A].atr Fountain Of The Gods (The) [v3.51] [Side B].atr

[Mclaneinc]

Had a quick play on Altirra, not a fan of the movement, awkward to stop the oneway movement, between that and dying every 5 secs I can't say I'm a fan BUT I've not read any instructions and its not my normal sort of game.

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

I'm the developer of this game.  I made it in high school and a bit while in college.  I can answer probably any question you might have about the game.  I'm glad some still take an interest in it.  I'll try and find some info and upload the instructions and some suggestions.  There are some Easter eggs in the game and also some cheat codes to help out if needed.

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

I am the developer of this game and am happy to see others still find an interest in it.  I will try and upload some documents to help understand the play in the game and some cheat codes if needed.  :

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

sorry for the double post.  Registration was a little tricky and I thought I lost my original post.

[Gunstar]

Hello @joeybutner@gmail.com, glad to see you here. I do really like your game, what I've been able to see of it, but it keeps crashing on me. I can usually go through a few screens, but then it crashes going from screen to screen after a little bit. Maybe it's an OS thing, so maybe you could tell us what OS it was developed on? OSA, OSB, or XL/XE OS's? I've been playing it with standard Atari Basic Rev. C in rom*. I would really like to play the game but it's pointless if I get 5 minutes into it and it crashes. Now maybe it's a corrupted disk image(s) as I downloaded it from Atarimania.com. I have been playing it on a *heavily modified 800 with multiple OS's available to try. I see that @Mclaneinc posted some disk images above, so I will give them a try.

 

I guess maybe I should also be asking if anyone else has had issues with it crashing?

Edited January 8, 2021 by Gunstar

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

1 minute ago, Gunstar said:

Hello @joeybutner@gmail.com, glad to see you here. I do really like your game, what I've been able to see of it, but it keeps crashing on me. I can usually go through a few screens, but then it crashes going from screen to screen after a little bit. Maybe it's an OS thing, so maybe you could tell us what OS it was developed on? OSA, OSB, or XL/XE OS's? I've been playing it with standard Atari Basic Rev. C in rom*. I would really like to play the game but it's pointless if I get 5 minutes into it and it crashes. Now maybe it's a corrupted disk image(s) as I downloaded it from Atarimania.com. I have been playing it on a *heavily modified 800 with multiple OS's available to try. I see that @Mclaneinc posted some disk images above, so I will give them a try.

Hmmmm... I'm not aware of why it may be crashing.  I built it initially using the Atari 800 and then moved to 130xe but ensured it could run on the 800 still.  I used the standard Atari Basic language (with a few ML routines built in for speed) to build and then compiled with the ABC compiler so that it did not require the Atari Basic cartridge.  I am unsure of the Basic Rev used though I suspect that isn't the cause for the crashes.  If I could learn to use an emulator I could likely troubleshoot.  Also, there is a dungeon editor available for FOG as well that I never released.  I think it was the first dungeon editor out at the time that I knew.  I also invented my own home-grown compression/decompression technology that might be amusing to share.

 

On a similar note, I am new to this emulator thing so I need to do some research on how to do it.  I'd also like to learn how to put programs/games out there for the emulator.  I have massive amounts of software that probably nobody has or at least a small amount of people have.

[Gunstar]

@joeybutner@gmail.com It may just be a corrupted disk image or something. I'm going to try the ones that were posted above, because if it worked for you on and 800 and a 130XE, then it should work fine on my computer, so either I have some advanced settings* set to on that shouldn't be or a bad disk image, or something like that. *My 800 has an Incognito in it, I don't know if you know what that is, since you seem to be new to Atari Age, but just do a search for it in this forum and it will come up, or go look it up on Youtube or something, it's now well known and documented in the community and internet.

 

I'm not an emulator user myself either, except on rare occasion, I use real hardware still, but there are plenty of people here who can help you get going with one, I think the best one is still supposed to be Altirra. It's what I use on the rare occasion.

 

If you happen to still have original copies for it you sold, I'd sure like to buy one! By the way, what made you suddenly decide to pop by and join Atari Age?

Edited January 8, 2021 by Gunstar

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

8 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

@joeybutner@gmail.com It may just be a corrupted disk image or something. I'm going to try the ones that were posted above, because if it worked for you on and 800 and a 130XE, then it should work fine on my computer, so either I have some advanced settings* set to on that shouldn't be or a bad disk image, or something like that. *My 800 has an Incognito in it, I don't know if you know what that is, since you seem to be new to Atari Age, but just do a search for it in this forum and it will come up, or go look it up on Youtube or something, it's now well known and documented in the community and internet.

 

I'm not an emulator user myself either, except on rare occasion, I use real hardware still, but there are plenty of people here who can help you get going with one, I think the best one is still supposed to be Altirra. It's what I use on the rare occasion.

 

If you happen to still have original copies for it you sold, I'd sure like to buy one! By the way, what made you suddenly decide to pop by and join Atari Age?

The original sellable disk was copy protected using CRC bad sector checks.  There could be something going on there.  I would never charge for a copy of the game.  I am in process of pulling my stuff back out of the attic so possibly in the next week or two I can find a clean copy of the game.  I know I have some.  And thanks for all of the helpful tips.  I do random searches for "Fountain of the Gods" out of boredom and I saw an new entry and I followed the trail to here.  I must say I'm impressed with the activity on this site because most other Atari sites I have been to have posts that are months or years old.  Kudos to this website!

 

[Gunstar]

@joeybutner@gmail.com This site is pretty much the center of the Atari community universe, the rest are just out-lying systems. There are a couple out there that though they have a microscopic amount of members compared to this one, they are active with new posts and content daily. Check out https://atari-owner.com/ for example.

 

As to charging for a copy, I'm more interested in original packaging, etc. for it's collect-ability. As per the first post that started this thread, I had circled your ad years ago and fully intended to order a copy back in the early 90's and just forgot about it for some reason. And that circle is what caught my eye when I was browsing my old mag collection, and apparently it all led to you joining here...

Edited January 8, 2021 by Gunstar

[snicklin]

Joey, on a different note, I wouldn't recommend using your email address as a username here. There's software (web spiders) out there that look for valid email addresses across the internet and then you will start to get a lot of spam. Gmail is good at filtering out spam, but inevitably some of it gets through.

 

It might be possible that your username can be changed by @Albert

[Albert]

1 minute ago, snicklin said:

It might be possible that your username can be changed by @Albert

Yes, I can do that.

 

 ..Al

[Gunstar]

5 hours ago, joeybutner@gmail.com said:

 then compiled with the ABC compiler so that it did not require the Atari Basic cartridge. 

Well, since it doesn't require BASIC due to being compiled, that may be my problem right there as I haven't been disabling BASIC to play it...it does sometimes show BASIC code when it crashes like : error at line 12937 blah blah blah (this is not an actual error I see, just something random I typed for an example), which made me think it required BASIC so I was trying different OS's and versions of BASIC to get it to work right. I will load it with BASIC disabled and see if that solves my issues.

[+MrFish]

It's listed on Atarimania.com as being "machine language".

 

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

58 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

Well, since it doesn't require BASIC due to being compiled, that may be my problem right there as I haven't been disabling BASIC to play it...it does sometimes show BASIC code when it crashes like : error at line 12937 blah blah blah (this is not an actual error I see, just something random I typed for an example), which made me think it required BASIC so I was trying different OS's and versions of BASIC to get it to work right. I will load it with BASIC disabled and see if that solves my issues.

Yeah, pretty sure that it won't run with BASIC enabled.  Let me know the results.

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

2 hours ago, Albert said:

Yes, I can do that.

 

 ..Al

I would appreciate if you could change my username to Jovick.  And thanks.  I did not realize I was using my email address as a username.

Edited January 9, 2021 by joeybutner@gmail.com

[snicklin]

12 minutes ago, joeybutner@gmail.com said:

I would appreciate if you could change my username to Jovick.  And thanks.  I did not realize I was using my email address as a username.

@Albert

[Gunstar]

@joeybutner@gmail.comOk, well I wrote the ATR images that @Mclaneinc posted to a floppy (side A 90K, side B 130K 1050) and first, it will only work on my 1050, it won't work with my Indus GT in 130K mode, but anyway I started the game in XL/XE mode with standard XL/XE OS and 64K, BASIC disabled (I tried other setups and with BASIC on or not, 800 OSB, XL/XE, Q-meg OS, Altirra OS, etc. and all different memory configurations from 64K (48K in OSB mode) up to 1088K and every option in between. It's the same result no matter what). It loads to the title screen and main character choice menu, then I choose a character, it tells me to put in the dungeon disk (the 130K side) and it loads to the game fine, as always. Then I proceed out the first room, second room loads fine, I go straight across to the secret passage (I went other directions previously and it worked for a couple more screens) it transports me to another room, and once I leave that room it either crashes to a solid blue screen without cursor or back to the main character menu every time. When I've gone other directions in the game I generally can go through a room or two more, but eventually it crashes and I see a brief moment where it flashes a run-time error, but it doesn't stay on screen long enough to see all the details, and with BASIC enabled (I know it's not supposed to be) instead of the run-time error it goes to a blue screen with a an error at line such and such like I said before.

 

Was the original game done with the boot disk a 90K and dungeon 130K? When writing the first ATR image to disk, the 90K single density, it only uses about a third of the disk space and the dungeon side uses all the 130K of enhanced density. It seems like the game would fit onto two singled density sides/disks so I'm wondering why the disks were done this way.

 

Anyway, every disk image version I've found fails the same way and no matter what compatibility settings I choose on my 800 Incognito as to machine, OS, memory, BASIC or not, etc., it does the same thing. It may all have to do with them being cracked versions of the original without the bad sector copy protection?

 

Has anyone else successfully played this game with available disk images and gotten it to work properly?

[joeybutner@gmail.com]

I can say that I have ran this game Altirra emulator with more success than you have.  I'm new to compilers but I have found the following issues:  1)  Colors seem to be just in black and white.  Not sure why.  2) The first secret passage outside the fountain room does NOT display properly.  Appears to be offset by several characters.  I did not notice this in other places but suspect there could be other issues with drawing the rooms.  3)  The game save option CONTL-S does not seem to work as it crashes when trying to save.  Haven't messed with this too much as it could be something I need to do with the emulator settings.

 

Overall I was able to play the game for a good while and I did crash 2-3 times out of maybe 30 games played.

 

The ATR was probably made from a cracked version of the game.  The dungeon disk side does not use files to store data but rather sector locations so it is important that that data remains in that state.

 

A note about teleporting.  If you use a teleport spell you will always teleport safely.  Stepping on a teleport trap or using the Teleport command will teleport you and the chances of landing in a wall (and immediately dying) is based on the percentage of open space in the room.  Examine command to see where traps may be.  If you teleport into a wall you immediately die and return to the main character selection screen.

 

My to-do on this will be to create new ATRs for this game based on the raw code I have in my possession and try to re-upload,

 

[Gunstar]

@joeybutner@gmail.comOn Altirra you have to set it for artifact colors or it will show only B/W, this is also true if your using real hardware with S-video out or one of the other modern video upgrade boards that put out RGB/DVI. Only composite out or RF out will show colors on a real machine.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Gunstar