![]() Fortunately, the makers of the DOSBox emulator anticipated this problem and included an easy fix. This can been seen in the screenshots on the GOG.com page for Betrayal at Krondor note that the circles around the character portraits at the bottom of some screens have been stretched horizontally, appearing as ovals. When running a game at 320×200 today, however, the default behavior is to keep the pixels square, resulting in a slight horizontal stretch of the image. Game designers and artists would therefore create the visuals based around these rectangular pixels. Since 320×200 is not a 4:3 resolution, it would display on the 4:3 screens with non-square pixels - something that was easily done with a CRT display but impossible on modern flatscreen displays which have fixed pixel sizes. ![]() Displays at the time were cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, and virtually all of them used a 4:3 aspect ratio. Betrayal at Krondor uses a resolution of 320×200, a common resolution in those days (it would be several years before “high resolution” graphics using 640×480 resolution would appear in PC games). The version provided by GOG runs fine, with one minor exception. A good opportunity, then, to take another look. Now, it’s conveniently for sale on GOG.com, bundled with its less popular semi-sequel, and pre-configured to run on modern machines using the DOSBox emulator. In 1994, the game was re-released on CD-ROM (instead of 3 1/2″ floppy disks), but I never had a chance to try that version. Later, I borrowed a copy of the game from a friend to try on a newer machine, and managed to get a little ways into the game before hitting a game-stopping bug, probably due to some hardware incompatibility. My first attempt was foiled by an insufficiently powerful computer, which could barely even load the game before crashing. I actually tried to play Betrayal at Krondor a couple of times in the early ’90s. Given the huge popularity of Skyrim and the other games in the Elder Scrolls series, known for their open-world role-playing design, I thought it would be interesting to look back at one of the first attempts at this type of game. Feist’s Riftwar novels (Feist later novelized the game, officially accepting its events as canon in his fantasy world of Midkemia). It is fondly remembered by fans as one of the earliest attempts at an open-world role-playing game, and for its strong ties to Raymond E. This time I decided to tackle a game I’ve been meaning to play for some time: Betrayal at Krondor, originally released back in 1993. Nearly a year! Time to get back in the swing of it. It’s been too long since my last History Lesson post. Previous History Lesson posts can be found here. ![]() The rest of the posts about Betrayal at Krondor are here: part 2, part 3, part 4. New readers may wish to read the History Lessons Introduction first. ![]()
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