Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review and Download (where available)

What I always loved about this one is how when you die, its not game over. You just start over again right before you died. You also can't make mistakes that make the game unsolvable, far as I'm aware.

Now thats something you won't find in old sierra games.

I uploaded the full speech version of the game so that may be available soon too.

Anyway, this is an awesome game - has one of the best stories in an adventure game ever.

Never heard of this game, but I've downloaded only because it was made by Microprose, I know I can't go wrong.

One of my favourite classics.
Oh how I died so many times and in so many different ways <3
I'd recommend it to anyone, in fact, now it's up here I probably will =D

It would be great to get the speech version. Thankyou. :kosta:

In that case I'll wait a little before downloading it. The game looks promising, and it's fantasy ^_^
It's a good, detailled review, I liked it :)

Damn, looks good but I can't get it to start.. set it up with VDMSound but the Dragon.Bat won't start under VDMSound. Any variables I have to look out for?

Have you set the sound and gameplay options using Install.exe? :)

Yup, yup. Used VDMSound to do so as I normally do to avoid problems.

Hmm, that's strange. :huh:
I just downloaded it, and started it with no problems with VDM Sound.

Maybe try downloading it again, and see if that helps? :unsure:

:wall:

Well tried setting up with some different settings and tried unzipping outside my Dosgames folder... nothing.. Running it from C:\Dragonsphere generates a critical error from VDMSound.. running it from C:\Dosgames\Dragonsphere it opens the VDMSound window, goes to a black full screen and crashes to the desktop with no errors.

I may see if that Digitized voice version comes through and see if that works. :hairpull:

((oh yeah.. I am actually a member here... just been so long I don't even remember my login :tai: LOL ))

Nice one. I played it back in 1994 or 1995, along with Police Quest IV. I had to purchase a hint book, 'cause I could not solve it by my own. Recommended to adventure game fans. I love the story twist in the middle of the game ^_^

BTW, don't want to be a nitpick here, but IIRC the character name is Callash, not Callosh.

I must say I'm surprised to see Dragonsphere here, though. I remember the request being rejected in the past due to ESA protection. If it is okay for Dragonsphere, perhaps we can get Rex Nebular next (unless it is considered as a mature game)? Or, is it already hosted on Abandonia as well? (Too lazy to search)

I just beat the sorceror and am trying to heal Lanie, but anytime I use an object it shuts down as soon as I am done using the object and in dos says

An error has occured, check to see if it is installed properally

Error "VariantLoadFailure" in module "<object>" data: 5108 5040

Most recent memory check: 31248
Most recent dos error: 2
Stack use indicator: 1174


And when i load up the game again, and resume, it takes me right to where i was wiht the object used and everything, but as soon as i use another object, it shuts me down again



This is an enjoyable game and I would love to keep playing, any help is appreciated.

@ ScytheKnight
I don't know what is causing your problems. :unsure: I have had no problems using VDM Sound.
Can you try using DosBox, and see it that makes a difference?



@ Alancer
What are you using to run the game. It doesn't work in Windows, you need DoxBox or VDM Sound. :ok:

Added the speech pack to the extras section! Many thanks to red_avatar for providing it! :kosta: I've kept the game archive without it for people with slower connections. Also, the new archive is from red_avatar so people that had problems, try re-downloading this one, perhaps it will be more compatible!

According to Oldwarez list it's Abandonware. :D
I think I'll go and review it. :D

I'm running it with VDMSound, and after setting the correct irq, I got it working but: No speech. I unpacked the speechpack into the directory and selected SB16 for speech at 220, 5, 1. (I/O, irq, dma). I have an AC97 audio.

VDM Sound, but I guess I will try Dos Box and see if it makes a difference.


THe entire game worked up until now.

VDMSound will NOT work for speech. Dragonsphere and other Microprose adventure games (for example, Return of the Phantom) had problems with speech on both VDMS and Dosbox. The programmers for DOSBOX found the solution, however, and since 0.65 these games will now fully function WITH sound.

The archive I uploaded is pre-set up and you should not change anything so PLEASE DON'T before making sure the sound works or not.

Thankyou Red Avatar. :kosta:

I will have to play the whole game again now, to hear the speech. :D

Thanks a ton for that :OK:

Thank you a lot, downloading now ^_^

Thanks a million. This is a really fabuous fantasy adventure- I absolutely LOVEd the twist. The story is really good and i had SO much fun-I just finished it I like it far better than kyrandia series, though less that old sierras king quest. Ill try with the voce pack now- thanks for this full package.

That will be great. As I already have both Dragonsphere and Rex Nebular, I won't be downloading either from here, but it sure is a good news to adventure fans out there.

Well I tried it out on Dosbox after getting the speech pack and it seems to work perfectly fine under Dosbox... however I too can't get speech (horrible jargon sounds instead of speech in game and nothing in the intro)

I'll try the new archive see if that helps any.


EDIT: OK looks like I also have an old version of Dosbox as well so I'll try the new version of that as well.


EDIT2: OK, not sure if it's the new archive or the new version of DoBox but both sound and speech are working. Just not in the intro >_<

Thanks Abandonia - you've made my day :D

I'd never even heard of Dragonshpere before now, so as an adventure game junkie this is pure gold!

*waits impatiently for the download to complete*

You are in for a treat. This game is brilliant for us adventure fans. :brain:

Like I said, only the newest DOSBOX will allow for sound and speech. It was a well known issue before and has finally been fixed. The intro has never worked for me either I'm afraid.

DMA speech!? Is that implying one of those printer port speaker dongle things? (Disney Sound Source, Covox Speech Thing...etc...)

It works great for me! Thank you all so much! :)

On a side note, the intro doesn't have voices for me either. This makes me inclined to believe that the intro doesn't have voices, but the speech pack could just happen to lack files for it...

Aside from voices, is it a full version of the game? I mean - no movies ripped? I hate when i get to the end of a game and it just throws me to main screen, because ending is not present.

Woo HOO! The download finished, and it all ran smoothly - Abandonia, you've made me a very happy little adventure gamer yet again :kosta:

just a warning. After incapacitating that monster in the pool near the shapeshifters I did not see to take the tentacles. Later when I needed them (after looking at the walkthrough) I found I did not have them and they were not at the pool for me to collect. Therefore the game was completely stuck and I had just wasted hours of play because the first place I went was to the shapeshifters area. I now could not be bothered playing it through to the end which is unfortunate.

That, amigo, is what savegames are for :)

Good work pointing out the obvious, 'amigo', but my save game before i missed picking up the tentacles was about 5 minutes into the game. As I said, the first place i went to was the shapeshifters place. If you know the point where the tentacles are need you would know that it is significantly further along in the game. The point I missed out is so early I may as well just start the game again. If I restore my save game to when I can take the tentacles I would still have a huge amount of gameplay that I would have to mindlessly repeat in order to return to the position that they are needed. That is not something I intend to do.

Are you sure the tentacles (or tentacle parts) are not at the pool? O.o
I just tried it - I dealt with the pool monster, left, then came back. The tentacle parts were there.
There should be 2 green things next to the forcefield. :huh:

it may have just been something wrong with mine. I definately went back a few times to recheck and nothing was there unfortunately :unsure:

I play all my old dos games in win98 and it works fine but I can't get the speech to work in dragonsphere I put the speech.hag in the directory and I either get strange noises or nothing. can anyone help?
Oh and one extra thing, If games don't work in 98 for you try starting in dos mode with a winxp startup disk it works great for me

Sorry that was me I forgot to log in

hey, im trying to install Dragonsphere but I'm not good with Dos at all. I downloaded dosbox and i manage to run the install.exe file and Reconfigure hardware options, but after the gameplay options screen i get a EMS driver warning. Does anyone know what to do about that? Please help me play this game...

If it says you don't have EMS installed, go to the DosBox config file, open it, and edit the line that says EMS=false to say EMS=true. Save and restart DosBox.

In Dosbox it already says EMS : True.

What does the error message say, exactly?

Are you running the game through DosBox or in Windows? Remember, you need to start DosBox manually.

Hello!

I hope anyone can help me. I have the original verison of the game on cd. But when i want to run the install process on dosbox there occurs an error after executing the install.exe "No such file or directory - C:\MEM.$$$" "The Error Code is 81". Does anyone know what that means, and how I can solve this problem?

Thank you!

Oddly, I've had success running this game on a P200MMX with 98SE installed. I created a PIF shortcut to the game file, and that was that. I have a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold in the computer and a Hercules gfx card (PCI). If anyone wants the details of the PIF settings let me know. :)

Actually, I may as well just tell you since I'm in front of the P200 box :)

Under the Program tab, I have

First box - MAINMENU
Cmd line - C:\ROMZON\MPSDISC.007\SPHERE\MAINMENU.EXE
Working - C:\ROMZON\MPSDISC.007\SPHERE
Batch file - I left this blank
Shortcut key - none
Run - Normal window

Advanced button

Suggest MS-DOS mode as necessary is checked.

---

Font tab...

Both font types, font size Auto

---

Memory tab...

Conventional memory Auto, Initial environment Auto

Protected is not checked

EMS - 2048
XMS - 2048, HMA checked
DPMI - Auto

---

Screen tab...

Usage: Full Screen, Initial Size at Default
Window: Display toolbar and Restore settings on startup are checked
Performance: Fast ROM emulation and Dynamic memory allocation are checked

---

Misc tab...

Allow screen saver is on
QuickEdit and Exclusive mode are not checked
Always suspend not checked
Warn if still active is checked
Idle sensitivity - fiddle with this at your leisure
Fast pasting is off
All shortcut keys are allowed.

-----

I think that covers it. :)

for those who are having sound/saving problems-

*right click all files in the zip and uncheck "read only" so that you will be able to reconfigure the game/save game.
*run install.exe and reconfigure sound. sound blaster with dosbox is fine.
*start the game, press escape, choose game play options and turn music on, sound on and if you have the speech files- speech on.

I wanted to try it, but there is one annoying thing -> is there any way to make our hero (and the other people too) walk _faster_? Setting CPU cycles to 10000 id DOSBox didn't help.

I have a problem. (By the way, this is legend789, I'm using guest because when I try to go here logued in, I get an error telling me that this place doesn't exist o.o)

Anyways, when I try to run INSTALL, after the configure the from- and to- folders, the Install tells me to insert disc 1 and press Enter. I press Enter but it does nothing.

I've tried:
1) Installing it from windows using the from- as "C:\MicroP~1\Dragon~1" and to- as "C:\MPS\Dragon".
2) Using DOSBox to mount "C:\MicroP~1\Dragon~1" as "A:\" and having Drive as "A:" and to- as "C:\MPS\Dragon".

Neither work.

Please someone know what's wrong? Thanks in advance ^_^

You are into validating group... :blink:
That should be the problem :)
I'll ask Admins, probably tomorrow they'll solve your problem.

You can't install this game to your hard drive, but you CAN set the sound options.
After you unzip the folder, click on 'Install', then 'Reconfigure Hardware Options'. This lets you set up the sound.
Now use 'Dragon' to start the game.

:OK:

Your account has not been activated. Did you get the activation e-mail?

BTW: I've activated it manually now.

Wow = D That worked wonders. I can't believe I missed that O.o Thanks so much Frodo ^_^

Thanks David86. As you can see I can log in now = ]

Thanks the_fifth_horseman = ] I probably did get it and it was in my bulk folder or something o.o But thanks for manually activating it = ]

Edit: I do have 1 very minor problem, which I don't think will affect the game, but I'll report it to be safe.

When I try to view the Intro I get the error message:
And return to DOSBOX Prompt. Is it anything dangerous? Or should I just ignore it.

Otherwise, the game runs perfectly and smoothly ^_^ (Though I had to use overlay rendering = ] But that's not a problem at all.)

Use LOADFIX before running the intro.

Thanks for helping again the_fifth_horseman = ]

Actually. I did look up the problem in Google, which got me a website, (actually a webpage on Microsoft.com) which talked about Anti-Viruses causing the problem.

That reminded me of the TSRs in DOS, so I tried loadfixing but I couldn't remember, however, due to never actually using it, so I tried to use D-Fend to do it for me. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem when I tried to loadfix Dragon.bat, so I figured I can't loadfix a .bat file.

So I manually tried, "loadfix mainmenu.exe -p".

Unfortunately, no matter what value I type into loadfix, it results in the same error when I go to Intro, unless it's 256 or higher, 256 (down to 132) gives me the same error as loading from Windows does, 512 doesn't load at all, 1024 loads without music. I read that loadfix -10 is the normally suggested value, but even that didn't work. I'm probably using the wrong values though. I don't normally even touch loadfix.

Like I said though. If it's not a huge problem later on in the game, I don't mind it too much, but it would be nice to watch the intro. Thanks again the_fifth_horseman ^_^

http://www.underground-gamer.com/imagebucket/737.jpg

anybody knows what does that "73766,347" mean?

i googled up a bit and it seems it also appeard in other Microprose games, like "Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender-Bender", as well

haha, didn't know about this but 347 isn't 73766 in hexadec or vice versa

do you think there is some kind of other relation between the numbers, or that they were just mocking infocom?

Wow seems like an in-joke/easter egg? Never noticed that myself to be honest.

Disappearing Items
 

Hello again guys! Thanks for helping me get the game to work last time :)

Unfortunately, I think I have a new problem.

Sort of Spoilers:
Has anyone else ever had this problem too?

Resolved: Never mind guys :3: I've figured it out. It turns out that the culprit was a corrupt save game! Thank you though. I hope that this helps anyone in the future. It's a good idea to backup not only normally but also at what you figure are important key points. Although I still have a good backup to continue, if I hadn't, I'd have to start over.

JAPO posted here a long time ago that he downloaded it because it was from Microprose. I did the same. I have never seen a bad Microprose game going all the way back to their Commodore 64 games!

Let's face it, Microprose means download on this site as far as I am concerned!

Dragonsphere will be available for free from GOG.com soon...

EDIT: Well, it was not available from GOG.com yet when I posted this yesterday, Frodo... :whistling:

It's available from GOG NOW! :rolleyes:

Is this game suggested ? Is a good adventure ? Never heard of it.

GOG version/iso
 

If you are like me and don't like GOG's installers/like to keep your dos folder tidy, this is for you. I have stripped and uploaded the GOG (free) Iso version in plain cd format here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JANELTTC

Unpack to your dos directory and run dragon.bat in dosbox. It will mount the cd and play the game, all without having to run GOG's installer nonsense.

Enjoy!

One of my favorites.

Got to this thread via Googling for "73766,347" in hopes of finding out what it was.

After a bit more poking around, I think I've found it (and so I thought I'd post it here, to help future searchers):
It's the CompuServe address of Matt Gruson, one of the creators of the game.

In the mid-90s, CompuServe user IDs fit that numerical pattern, and there's a direct reference to it being his in the README for some shareware he worked on.

A web search shows references to this number in "Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender" and a config file of "Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu". Sure enough, he worked on both of those.

So, yeah, it's an Easter egg--"here's contact info for one of the developers."

Yeah I just played this because it showed up on the game bookshelf on gog.com for free. It was good! Felt like plenty of effort was put into completing it. Not rough around the edges.

Word of warning: gog provides supplemental pdfs including a "prince callash examination paper". It's actually necessary to read that.

It also contains a game manual. I read the manual halfway through the game and found exactly three things I didn't already know:

1. Double-click "look" for a description of the room overall. This can help you focus on what the game considers important about the room.
2. Click both mouse buttons at once for main menu.
3. Space bar speeds up walking. Sometimes. When it feels like working. It's better than nothing.

So if you know those things, don't bother with the manual. Just read the examination paper.

And there is a scar on some character somewhere. That's not a spoiler -- it's a detail you are expected to observe, but that expectation is unreasonable given Dragonsphere's graphics. So watch for an off-color pixel that might be a scar.

I liked that game very much, although without a Walkthrough it would be difficult mainly in the dunes, fairies and questions from the magic branches of the evil wizard. :hairpull: :wall:

And there are also twisted plots and the family drama of the dispute within royalty. Well, unfortunately a very common fact that royalties have faced for centuries.

Among the Microprose Adventure games, I found Dragonsphere to be the most “joyful” and “vivacious” game if we compare Rex Nebular (lone wolf :sick:) and Return of the Phantom (very lugubrious :().

These are hidden credits for the games designer Matt Gruson
 

These are hidden credits for the games designer Matt Gruson

I found this in one of the read-me files:

*******************************************
* VERSION 6.1 NOTES: (Matt Gruson - 5/93) *
*******************************************

Contact on CompuServe @ 72360,2432 or
73766,347
Prodigy @ PTJT50A
GEnie @ M.GRUSON

73766,347 and sometimes PTJT50A appears on walls of different games,
Like Dragonsphere, Rex-nebualr, The riddle of master Lu, Earthrise...

Even though those are games of different companies,
they are all games that their development was contributed by Matt Gruson

https://www.mobygames.com/developer/...eloperId,2711/

I finally finished this game. I have the GOG version.