Dennis Strelow

I picked up a couple of Commodore 64s and I’ve been test driving them with Pool of Radiance, the classic AD&D CRPG. The Commodore 64 and Pool of Radiance are both new to me.

The Commodore 64

The Commodore 64, introduced in 1982, was an 8-bit computer like the Apple II and Atari 400/800. The machine was a giant of the home computer era: Wikipedia says “between 12.5 and 17 million” were sold, that it’s the best selling computer of all time, and that it had a massive software library of almost 10,000 titles.

The 64 had a MOS 6510 CPU, a variant of the same 6502 that Apples and Ataris had, running at about 1 MHz. For perspective, a modern 2024 CPU runs at 3,000 times that clock speed or more, and does more each clock cycle than the 6510. The Commodore 64 had 64 kilobytes of RAM, thus the name, whereas a PC in 2024 can have 1,000,000 times that.

The 64 also had custom graphics and sound chips, the VIC II and SID, which were “instrumental in making the C64 the best-selling home computer in history.” The VIC II supported screen resolutions like 320x200 and 160x200, and up to 16 colors. Again for comparison, a modern GPU in 2024 supports 4k resolution with full color, but also supports 3D rendering and can do substantial parallel computing beyond just graphics.

Commodore sold the 64 from 1982 until the company went bankrupt in 1994. The first model, the “bread bin,” looked very similar to Commodore’s previous computer, the VIC-20. A more streamlined “64C” model was introduced in 1986.

The 8-Bit Guy has a series of videos about Commodore’s machines including the 64, focusing on tech. Commodore’s business history is also interesting. For instance, Commodore’s home computer price war in the early 80s drove Texas Instruments out of the market. Jack Tramail was Commodore’s chairman, and his move to rival Atari set up the competition between the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST in the 16-bit era.

Commodore 1541 floppy drive, floppy emulators

The 64’s floppy disk drive, the Commodore 1541, is notable in its own right, or at least notorious. It was slow, 8 times slower than Atari’s drive and 50 times slower than Apple’s. IEEE Spectrum said “the one major flaw of the C-64 is not in the machine itself, but in its disk drive.”

Working floppy drives are getting hard to find, but you can use a floppy drive emulator instead, which looks like a floppy drive to the 64 but uses modern storage. I’m using the Ultimate-II+L, which uses USB sticks for storage.

My setup

I picked up two Commodore 64s from eBay. The first is a nicely refurbished bread bin, but went on the fritz after about a week. The second is the streamlined 64C model, which is working well.

I also picked up two 1541 floppy drives from eBay. Neither worked for me at first. The web suggested that formatting a blank disk with them might reset them and make them work again. That actually did make one of my drives work, but it went bad again after about a week.

After that I switched to the Ultimate-II+L floppy emulator, which works well. Of course the emulator can’t read from real floppies, so you’re limited to disk images from the web. But one advantage is that you can easily create as many virtual floppies on your USB key as you want. For Pool of Radiance, that’s been handy for making a new save disk for each save.

My kind neighbors lent me their nice CRT TV to use as a display, which has also been great for other retro machines like the Atari 2600, TI-99/4A, GameCube, etc.

Pool of Radiance

Pool of Radiance is a CRPG published by Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI) in 1988. Matt Barton called it “...one of the greatest role playing games of all time and probably about the most fun you could have with a Commodore 64 in 1988,” and the CRPG Addict similarly wrote, “Pool of Radiance is the best game I've played since starting this blog.” Pool of Radiance spawned SSI’s series of “gold box” games, which together sold 800,000 copies.

Although many - probably all - previous CRPGs descended from Dungeons and Dragons, Pool of Radiance was the first to use the actual AD&D rules. The game has a long campaign-style story written by TSR, the original D&D folks, set in the Forgotten Realms.

In a little more detail, the player’s party has to clear the small town of New Phlan of the monsters plaguing it, while they slowly learn about the “Boss” driving them. The map of Phlan and its surroundings from the game’s journal booklet, and the map of the slums from the hint book, give an idea of the scale of the game.

The game

Here’s the physical game. The game comes on four double-sided disks, and you have to swap disks frequently while playing.

The game comes with a decoder wheel, for the copy protection scheme, but the wheel is also used to translate a few clues during the actual game.

To load the game, you use the the classic Commodore 64 incantation ‘LOAD”*”,8’, which loads the first program (*) on the first drive (8).

After loading, you’re treated to a splash screen and music, and a credits screen.

The TSR authors listed there are TSR original gangsters. For instance, David “Zeb” Cook wrote the D&D Expert Set, AD&D 2e, and the Planescape setting.

I’d summarize the gameplay as three parts. The first is navigating New Phlan and its surroundings in the 3D view, which I think is most similar to The Bard’s Tale (which I haven’t played). Many of the 3D views look like cubicle farms to me, but locations can have interesting textures and colors, like New Phlan’s city hall and dock, or Mendor’s library.

When you run into trouble in the 3D view, you’re briefly treated to a Monster-Manual-like portrait of the monster. Here are a few portraits - goblins, orcs, and a basilisk.

From there you go into the second part of the game, combat, shown in a top-down view. Here are some shots of the top-down combat in the two most notorious early-game fights, the trolls in the slums, and the Boss’s mob in Sokal Keep.

The third part is logistics, done with text menus: leveling up your characters, buying and selling equipment, resting, memorizing spells, etc. Some tasks, like redividing money between the party members, take a little investigation and trial-and-error to learn, but you soon develop the rituals and muscle memory for them. Overall though, using the text menus is like doing 80’s style data entry.

My experience with the game

I’ve claimed the rewards for the first few areas of the game - the slums, Sokal Keep, Kuto’s Well, Podol Plaza, the Cadorna Textile House, and Mendor’s Library - and my characters are between 3rd and 5th level. Judging from the hint book, I’ve finished about one-fourth of the game. I’ve become pretty fluent with the game: combat and spellcasting; the cycle of combat, healing, re-memorizing spells, and resting; leveling; managing the party’s money; all that kind of stuff.

Is the game “one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time,” for me? No, at least not so far. The first big part of the game is clearing the slums, a joyless grind full of random encounters. The other areas after the slums are more fun - quicker areas with unique encounters and leads about the game’s larger story. So, maybe it’ll be more fun going forward.

For graphics, the monster portraits are nice, but the 3D views and top-down combat screens are downright ugly. For sound, the sound effects and even the splash screen music are charmless.

I couldn’t stop thinking about two other games while I played. The first is Dungeon Master, which I haven’t played yet. Dungeon Master was a CRPG for the Atari ST that came out six months before Pool of Radiance. The game is a colorful first-person dungeon crawl, and at least visually, it’s the game for 1988, the 16-bit era. SSI seemed to think so too - they soon responded with Eye of the Beholder, a Dungeon-Master-like game using the AD&D rules.

The other is the original Baldur’s Gate, which came out for PC in 1998, ten years after Pool of Radiance. Baldur’s Gate is also a CRPG using the (second edition) AD&D rules, and mostly takes place in a top-down isometric view like the combat in Pool of Radiance. That’s where the similarities end though. Baldur’s Gate has beautiful graphics and sound, like the pre-rendered isometric scenes, spell animations, and voice acting. Combat is “real-time with pause,” which plays out in real time unless you pause it to issue new instructions to the characters. And unlike Pool of Radiance, the game’s detective story is actually about your characters, and the game can be laugh-out-loud funny.

Incidentally, I notice that while Matt Barton called Pool of Radiance “one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time,” he actually called Baldur’s Gate “the greatest computer roleplaying game of all time.” Even in the 2020’s, a lot of new games are directly modeled on Baldur’s Gate, and Baldur’s Gate still routinely appears on lists of the best CRPG’s of all time.

AD&D

One reason I picked Pool of Radiance to try the Commodore 64 was to learn some first-edition AD&D. I never played AD&D when it was current, from 1977-1989.

Here are the AD&D hardcovers, 1977-1979, all by Gary Gygax.

I have played a little of AD&D’s simpler siblings, Tom Moldvay’s D&D Basic Set and David Cook D&D Expert Set, both from 1981. Those games share some strange features with AD&D. For instance, you get most of your experience points from finding treasure. That’s straight-up weird, and Gygax actually concedes in the Players Handbook, “Gaining experience points through the acquisition of gold pieces and slaying monsters might be questioned by some individuals as non-representative of how an actual character would become more able in his or her class.”

Other strange things in AD&D include “lower armor class is better” and arbitrary restrictions on the maximum level that different races can reach in different classes. For instance, halflings can only be fighters, thieves, or fighter/thieves, and can only reach 6th level as fighters. AD&D has multiclassing, but you have to multiclass your character when you create it. In contrast, In modern D&D you can multiclass over time by choosing a class for each level. For instance, a fifth-level fighter who levels up and adds a level of rogue would get the class features of a fifth-level fighter and a first-level rogue.

If you know the modern edition of AD&D though, D&D 5e, many things about AD&D are very familiar. Many of the go-to spells in 5e are already present in AD&D - Magic Missile, Detect Magic, Bless, and many others. Sleep is already your go-to for shutting down hordes of low-level enemies. As with 5e, clerics and magic users get new spells every other class level - 1st level spells at class level 1, 2nd level spells at class level 3, etc.

What about combat? I’m really not sure at this point. I thought while I was playing Pool of Radiance that the tactical combat was very similar to (a subset of) 5e combat, and that I was mostly seeing the D&D combat I knew - roll initiative, move, attack, cast, maybe bandage/stabilize a downed ally. But, I’ve been surprised by how unhelpful the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide are on combat, so still more to learn there.

I went to Gen Con again this year with most of the regular crew - Buck, Dave, Karen, Lou, Nick, and Rob. James had to miss this year, but my cousin Amy joined us, and we drove back and forth from Appleton to Indy together.

Wednesday night dinner. Dave's old gaming friends also joined us.

For games, I did all D&D again this year. I played some with Amy and Nick, and played the 2024 D&D Open with Buck, Dave, Lou, and Nick. A new comrade Julio brought our Open party up to six. We started slow in the Open but came back to land right in the middle of the rankings, 25 out of 50.

We caught up with Zac at an early breakfast before the Open Saturday morning.

A lot of fun costumes this year...Dr. Evil was my favorite this year.

There was a series of seminars for D&D’s 50th anniversary, with some of the original gangster authors from the day, hosted by Jon Peterson. I was able to catch the seminars with Steven R. Marsh and Mike Carr, and Luke Gygax and Allen Hammack.