Favorite FRUA mods?

[Jadefang]

Originally Posted by Arminius Another one I remember loving was a kind of parody FRUA module with lots of little references to pop culture. The funniest for me being the appearance in the fantasy world of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder [of the XFiles - my favorite show of all time] who are overheard discussing the strange world they find themselves in, arguing over the impossible vs the possible existence of dragons, and magic and such [I might be adding to what I remember since I dont really remember much of it] and I think Mulder explains that they've somehow crossed over into a parallel universe in which fantasy is real. I remember one of the first NPCs you meet was called big-n-greasy. I remember laughing the whole way through the game. Anyone know which one that was? I'd love to play it again for inspiration.

I think that was The Final Reckoning (it's thefinal.zip on the Rosedragon Archive). I remember playing that one before.

Other modules I found funny were the Yezukriis series, where the 2nd game used George Bush Sr.'s picture for the high blade of Mulmaster.

[manikus]

Ya, the Yezukris modules were pretty fun, I recall.

One of my all-time favorites was "Mars in Misalignment" by hans. Then there are the Ben Sanderfer modules which are easily on par with the better Goldbox games.

[Arminius]

Originally Posted by manikus There are some good mods there. It would be cool if someone made an index with like a two or three sentence description of each. Unfortunately, the name of the zip file does not always convey the mod very well.

There already is one. Here. http://frua.rosedragon.org/modulelist/file.php

Thats the full list for PC games there is another list for Mac


I've tried many of the mods in the FRUA database, especially those from the 90's when I was getting into making hacked FRUA adventures and playing those made by others. In my opinion the best ones are those based on original classic AD&D modules.
I guess its the big part of me that is into nostalgia and preservation of things I consider under appreciated classics.

Here are the two I mentioned by name earlier.

barrier.zip Expedition to the Barrier Peaks 678 Nol Drek 9 None Hacked 27 Jul 1998
The classic AD&D Sci Fi tournament module. Your party of doughty adventurers are recruited by His High Radiance, Owen III, Grand Duke of Geoff to explore a mysterious armored cave in the mountains.

tombofh.zip The Tomb of Horrors 147 Narsham 11 +1 Not Hacked 14 Oct 1996
S1: The Tomb of Horrors, one of the more infamous AD&D modules of all time, is converted into a UA module.

Theres a whole bunch of mods set in the world of Ravenloft. And Ray Dyer did a whole series of classic AD&D Realm modules.

As for the original stuff, I think the one's which do not take themselves too seriously are my favorites, I like to laugh and humor can turn a horrid tragedy [in terms of game design] into a lovable laugh fest.

Oddly enough, in addition to laughter, I also really enjoy horror for some strange reason... lol. So heres John Rudy's Cthulu mods..

stars.zip The Stars are Right! 488 John Rudy Pregen None Hacked 2 Aug 1995
The first C all of Cthulhu module for UA. (Requires UATOOLS). Reviewed in UANL 13.

thecrawl.zip The Crawling Chaos (Call of Cthulhu) 1247 John Rudy Pregen Modest Hacked 9 Apr 1996
The single most hacked module in FRUA. Reviewed in UANL 15.

[Arminius]

Originally Posted by Jadefang I think that was The Final Reckoning (it's thefinal.zip on the Rosedragon Archive). I remember playing that one before. Other modules I found funny were the Yezukriis series, where the 2nd game used George Bush Sr.'s picture for the high blade of Mulmaster.

Yeah thats the one, thanks! I'm going to try the Yezu series too now.

@Manikus: I'm going to play those you recommended as well.

Oh almost forgot to ask. I haven't been able to get that ckit-crk.exe thing to work. Is there a better password hack util somewhere? That codewheel password thing is a total pain.

[manikus]

I completely forgot about this list. Too bad the newest mod on it is 4 years old. Of course, I don't how many have come out in that time...

Thanks for posting the link. That should be a valuable resource. Looking through the list, I think that I have literally downloaded all of them and at least started playing them. I count just about 50 that I've played the whole way through and I have about half of those archived on my system in case I ever want to play them again.

I'm starting to get nostalgic here, and am going to have to bust FRUA out for a couple of hours.

[manikus]

Originally Posted by Arminius Oh almost forgot to ask. I haven't been able to get that ckit-crk.exe thing to work. Is there a better password hack util somewhere? That codewheel password thing is a total pain.

I use UAShell to run all of my FRUA games through and it takes care of it for me.

[Arminius]

Originally Posted by manikus I completely forgot about this list. Too bad the newest mod on it is 4 years old. Of course, I don't how many have come out in that time...

Is there still an active FRUA community and people still using it to make their games?

Originally Posted by manikus Thanks for posting the link. That should be a valuable resource. Looking through the list, I think that I have literally downloaded all of them and at least started playing them. I count just about 50 that I've played the whole way through and I have about half of those archived on my system in case I ever want to play them again.

No prob. Glad I'm not the only one feeling that way. Yeah I had already went through them all before picking out ones I wanted to try but now I've archived every last one with the same thing in mind. Even with the descriptions you can't really know which ones are diamonds in the rough without actually trying them. And I think it would be great practice to try and remake our favorite ones in DC as well as a way to preserve them as classic games and to have more DC mods to show people new to DC. And maybe encourage some of those FRUA pioneers to come back the scene.

Originally Posted by manikus I'm starting to get nostalgic here, and am going to have to bust FRUA out for a couple of hours.

Thats what I've been trying to do this weekend but the password thing is cramping my style. I know I cracked it before, years ago with UAtools or something but now I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Here are the steps I took:

I followed the steps outlined in UA Newsletter #35, article by Brett (airamil@yahoo.com)

Step #1. Download Dosbox and install to default directory. (Already had latest version of DOSBOX installed so on to step two.)

Step #2. "Download D-Fend v2 setup" version 2.0.62.42. -- I went there and found the newer version which is D-Fend reloaded - got it.

Step #3. Run/install the program with default options. (check)

Open D-Fend
select 'Profile'
select 'Add with Wizard'.

Add a Profile name; i.e. UAShell or FRUA.
Under GameEXE,[D-fend reloaded is a little different here but I managed to figure it out] ...

hit the browse button and select either uashell.bat or start.bat in your FRUA/UA directory. [the new D-fend recommends putting any files or folders your running in DOSBOX into the root folder of D-Fend which is the Virtualdrive folder in C:\Programs\D-fend.. etc. so I had to stop what I was doing and move the FRUA folder there..] Ok, done

Next click on the setup.exe and add install.exe from the FRUA/UA directory. Click on the '>>' button twice. On this screen you will see an 'auto create' button, click on that once. Next click on '>>' six times taking the default settings. Then click on 'finish' button. This will add your game to the D-Fend games menu. Click on the one you created and it will automatically run DosBox. [that last paragraph was really confusing in D-Fend REloaded which is different. But after some minor bungling I figured it out.] Done.

You might have to tweak your settings if you are running anything strange; the default soundcard settings are Address 220, IRQ7, DMA1. Because this is an emulator, it can emulate any of the old soundcards. At this point in its development it will run about 95% of all DOS games, with a few exceptions among the latest games just before DOS died. Let me know if you have any more questions and how it goes. [Didnt have to change anything. Except I changed it from full screen to windowed so I could multitask while playing and also so the graphics aren't stretched out on my 1280x1024 screen. So everything worked fine. Its just that damn passworded codewheel annoyance in FRUA thats stopping me now.]

Edit: @Manikus - I am using Uashell from within Dosbox from within Dfend to load FRUA. Do I need to apply one of the hacks in UASHell before running a design? Which one is it? Does it come with Uashell basic or do I need the c version with all the hacks included?

[manikus]

I use Dosbox and D-Fend for all of my Goldbox games, but, I don't use it for FRUA. UAShell runs just fine on it's own, at least under XP Pro/Home. I'll poke around in UAShell a bit and see what I can find. I'll report back shortly.

[SilentThief]

I think the icestorm site had the manual as a zip you could DL and then have the passwords for FRUA.

ST

[manikus]

True, you could do that in a pinch. I'm just too lazy to do it when I know there's a little tool that will solve the problem for all time without me having to do anything after that first time.