Bugs:Dungeons of Avalon

This page details bugs of Dungeons of Avalon.

Dungeons of Avalon has various bugs, some of which are specific to the English-language release.

Game is unwinnable

A bug prevents the player from winning the game. Not only does it prevent the end credits from triggering when the player defeats the final boss, it also makes the final boss so difficult that it is practically impossible to beat. This occurs in both the English and German releases.

Monster encounters in Dungeons of Avalon are one of two types: one where the number and type of monsters are randomly selected based on the dungeon level, and one where the composition is fixed based on an entry in an encounter list. Naturally, the final boss fight is the latter type.

When the player flees a monster encounter without defeating all the enemies, the square remains hostile. For a random encounter, that means the encounter will be randomly generated from scratch when re-visited, which can be exploited to grind for XP. However, for a fixed encounter, defeated enemies are never recorded in the fixed encounter list.

This makes the game unwinnable for two reasons.

End credits trigger broken

Firstly, the trigger for the game victory and end credits sequence is that the enemy count for all three enemy groups in the final fixed encounter is reduced to zero. Because kills are not recorded in the fixed encounter list, even if the encounter is defeated, the game win state never triggers.

The relevant bytes are 011f 051e 081e: 1 Dark Lord, 5 Fire Trolls, 8 Fire Trolls. To trigger the win condition, the bytes 01, 05 and 08 must be reduced to 00, and the party must be in the Dungeon or Castle (i.e. not in a combat or a town).

You can use memory editing in an emulator such as WinUAE or FS-UAE to trigger the end credits and see it for yourself. Enter the Dungeon or Castle and perform the following steps:

Code	Effect
Shift+F12, End+F12, or F12+D	Launch WinUAE/FS-UAE debugger
s 011f051e081e 0 0	Find the memory location of the boss fight fixed encounter entry. Write down or copy the hexadecimal address it finds.
W <ADDR> 00 1f 00 1e 00 1e	Reduce all monsters to zero. Replace <ADDR> with the memory location you got in the previous steps. If the previous step found multiple addresses, use this with all of them.
g	Resume emulation.

The game's sequel, Dungeons of Avalon II, fixes this bug by correctly recording defeated enemies in the encounter list.

Final boss too difficult

Secondly, because your kills do not persist between encounters with a group, you have to defeat the Dark Lord and his retinue of 13 Fire Trolls in a single fight. This encounter is practically unwinnable on those terms.

In some CRPGs (including Dungeons of Avalon II), you can whittle down the enemy numbers a little at a time, retreating to heal up between attempts. You can't do this in Dungeons of Avalon because all 13 Fire Trolls will be back when you return.

The encounter is also extremely difficult, even at maximum character level. The Anti-Aura scroll which removes the Dark Lord's magic immunity does persist between rounds, but the real danger is the 13 Fire Trolls, each of which can use an full-party area damage spell or strong melee attack. The spell Medusas Eye (Medusas Auge) will take out an entire stack of Fire Trolls, but usually half the party is killed by the time you land one. The encounter is therefore unwinnable because if you retreat to resurrect party members, all the defeated Fire Trolls would return.

Repeat credits bug

If you beat the game (which is impossible due to a bug, see above), the end credits scene will play every time you re-enter the dungeon. This prevents you from exploring the dungeon after you win.

Misleading stat names

Party members have two important derived stats for defense and attack. In German, the stat on the left is RS (Rüstungstärke, armor strength) and on the right is AS (Angriffsstärke, attack strength).

However, the English translation calls the defensive stat WC, and the attack stat AC. Most RPG veterans would interpret AC to mean Armor Class, and therefore WC to mean Weapon Class. however, it's the other way around. The English version has no manual.

There are numerous translation and spelling errors in the English release also.

Empty dungeon bug

The bootleg English translation was later mistakenly translated as freeware, and was perhaps more popular than the original release. However, in at least one release, a major bug causes the entire dungeon to be missing. The bug can be seen in this video.

The cause is a missing copy of the DUNG file. The game disk usually has two copies of the file, one in the disk's root directory and one in the DAT directory. The translators had to de-compress the game's main executable to edit most of the game's text, but never re-compressed it. The resulting lack of disk space must have led them to delete one of the spare copies of the DUNG file, presumably on the mistaken assumption that the duplicate file was extraneous. Unfortunately, it is not.

The solution is to play the officially translated copy of the game, or to load one of the save games, each of which includes a full copy of the dungeon file. Since save games work fine, this may explain why nobody noticed the initial release was bugged.