The original Bard's Tale trilogy.

[J T]

The Bard's Tale has been on Steam for awhile, but it was always the comical remake that people often complained was too far removed from the original Bard's Tale. Now you can get the original trilogy along with The Bard's Tale, and if you've already bought it, you should have it bundled in now if you update.

[MrPopo]

Hmmm... considering that the whole thing is only $2.50, I think I'm going to snag this. I've heard that II and III are a step down from I, but even just getting I for $2.50 is worth it.

[Frag Mortuus]

The Bard's Tale has been on Steam for awhile, but it was always the comical remake that people often complained was too far removed from the original Bard's Tale. Now you can get the original trilogy along with The Bard's Tale, and if you've already bought it, you should have it bundled in now if you update.

J T. Didn't I read a post a while ago where you decided to quit Steam because you didn't like their new policies concerning game ownership? If I'm mistaken I'm sorry. If it was you, then did you just decide to deal with it?

[J T]

Yes, that was me. I still use Steam, but I haven't really been making purchases there and I haven't been promoting the service like I used to. I just wanted to highlight for people that may have already purchased Bard's Tale (like me) that they now have the original trilogy. There wasn't a lot of fanfare about it, so you might have suddenly come to have Bard's Tale 1-3 without knowing it.

[MrPopo]

So some more details on how the original trilogy works.

There are three .bin files in the Bard's Tale directory which are archives which contain the original Apple II disk images and some configuration files. The first time you run a particular game of the trilogy it unpacks the archive and dumps them in the root of the Bard's Tale directory. It seems that inXile jammed the KEGS Apple II emulator into the executable and then reads the appropriate configuration file and loads the appropriate disk images. The downside is that it seems that you get worse performance than you would just running KEGS standalone with the extracted disk images. When I was running it through Bard's Tale things were slower and I had a bad audio-skip problem. Running standalone everything was fine.

Also, it looks like BT1&2 are the IIgs version, while 3 is just the regular Apple II version since apparently a IIgs version was never made. This makes 3 look like ass compared to the first two and it runs slower.

[Hobie-wan]

Why didn't they put the PC versions? That's just stupid.

[MrPopo]

I'd guess it's a rights thing. It might be that EA owns the rights to the DOS ports but not the Apple II versions.

[Hobie-wan]

EA released the C64 and Apple II versions as well. I own all 3 for C64 and my friend in intermediate had them for his Apple. Though it did come out a bit later for PC, so I guess since that isn't a dead platform they're clutching to them. Though if it were just a dead platform thing, they could have done the Amiga versions. *shrug*