![[Goofy dragon]](pics/dragonrawr.png)
Behold, for it is the lady Dragon Queen Berengaria! Devourer of mankind, the things nightmares are formed of!! Nevermind my representation of her, the plushness is only there to hide her true sinister nature!
Hahaha, oh my artwork is truly terrible, but I had fun trying to draw a dragon. Most ten year olds could draw circles around me, including my own child, but I won't let it hold me back.
So, last night I spent a couple of hours trying to finish Darkmere, and the quest was simple, destroy the hatchlings in the final room, and then kill Berengaria, there was a problem though.. I went from room to room, killing these little drakes of death, they were complete pains in the rear, and the final moment would not be triggered.. I could not get the Dragon Queen to fight me.
![[Goofy dragon]](pics/eggs.png){kind=small} |
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In the above beautifully illustrated table, is the final map where you confront her majesty, there are a total of nine sections, eight of these sections have dragon eggs in them, one has Berengaria. When you get close to one of the eggs, a little baby dragon comes breaking it's way out and tries to cook you. I killed a few of the hatchlings, and spoke to the queen, she gave a bit of dialogue, a surprise plot twist, and then I was supposed to kill all of her babies.
Yeah, that did not work out so well. I killed all of her babies, and the thing is they kept respawning after I killed them and returned to their room. Oh it was such a pain, I kept going around these nine sections, looking for something I missed, and after a couple of hours I gave up.
Something was wrong, I knew there must be a bug in the game and decided to give it a try again today. The problem, as far as I could tell, is that each time one of these hatchlings dies, there must be some counter keeping track of it all. That tracker must not have been updating correctly. As far as the rest of the game, everything ran perfectly.
![[darkmere info stuffs]](pics/darkinfo.png)
Eventually I figured out what was going wrong, you see I have an accelerator card in my Amiga, with an additional 32 megabytes of ram. MMU is enabled by default on 68040 processors, which is what the accelerator card is. The problem is memory management, I disabled MMU in the ToolTypes, and Eureka!! I was able to trigger the Dragon Queen (Queens are so easily offended!) and engage in the final battle. I was able to watch the end sequence, and finish the game :)
For those of you curious, the window I have displayed is sort of like the properties window you have on Windows icons. ToolTypes are similar to commands you give, it is a pretty cool way of doing things. For a lot of files in amiga, there are actually two files. In this case, one was simply called "darkmere" the other "darkmere.info" They are somehow linked to one another, the one you see from the desktop, would be darkmere.info, it is also the icon for the file.
And on a positive note, I can now play a lot of games I could not get to run earlier, even Lotus 3!:)