Curse of the Azure Bonds

Curse of the Azure Bonds runs in Amber Folio today. You supply your own copy of the game; the guide explains what to hand over.

The player has these built in for Curse of the Azure Bonds. Each is drawn on the game’s own screen in its own colours, and none of them changes the story, the rules or the challenge; your game files are never modified. They work on the recognised release above, and a copy the emulator does not recognise runs with all of them unavailable.

Press Options on the player’s toolbar and go to Enhancements for a switch for each one. You can change them while the game runs, and what you choose is kept with your copy of the game. Every one is on from the start; switch off any you would rather do without. The CRT filter, the on-screen keyboard and the saves panel are the player’s and work in every game; Enhancements describes those.

Map where you have walked

Tab draws a map of the squares your party has walked, over the roster on the game's own screen, and Tab takes it away again.

How to use it. It is on from the start; click the picture so the game has the keyboard. While exploring a city or a dungeon, press Tab to show the map and Tab again to hide it; on a touch screen, Tab is on the on-screen keyboard. The map is kept with each saved game: saving writes it and loading that save brings it back, so a new party starts with an empty map, and what you explore without saving is lost with the session, just as the party's own progress is. To do without it, switch it off on the Enhancements tab of Options, on the player's toolbar.

It is drawn into the game's own planes in the game's own sixteen colours, at the game's own resolution: a wall in the colour of the tiles the 3D view blits for it, a door leaf where a wall face has been seen shut, and the area's name set in the program's own glyphs. Tab is taken out of the keystroke buffer before the program's key routine looks, so the game observes exactly what it would have observed had the key never been typed, and the panel steps aside whenever another bar takes the screen — an encounter, a shop, camp — and comes back when the party's own bar returns.

Journal entries, on the game's screen

When the game cites a journal entry, it goes on your list, and a Notes command on the party's bar opens that list — newest first, unread marked — and any entry on it as a full screen.

How to use it. Two steps, the first of them once. Give the player your Adventurer's Journal PDF: it comes in with the game folder if it is in there, or through Choose file (or a Dropbox link) on the journal's row in the player's Files panel. Choosing it there reads it straight away; a journal that came in with the folder is read with Read your journal on the same row. The reader itself is on from the start. In the game, choose Notes from the party's command bar to see what has been cited so far.

The text is your own journal: your PDF, located and read once and then kept in this browser's own storage and nowhere else. How it is read depends on the printing. The journal Steam sells is typeset, and is read from its own text in a moment, with nothing to download. The one GOG sells is scans, and reading those means an OCR engine, about seven megabytes of one, served from this site's own origin rather than from anywhere else and downloaded only when a scanned journal is read; that reading takes minutes. Neither is repeated on a later visit. Nothing of your journal ships with the emulator or with this site, and nothing of it leaves your browser. An entry opens as a whole screen in the game's font, paged with NEXT, PREV and EXIT, with an entry that is a drawing shown as the page after its caption; the screen is given back through the program's own composer. Notes is the only way in, because a command on the party's own bar is the one place a whole screen can be handed back. A citation is matched by its shape — the word a numbered section is called by, and the number after it — rather than by any of the game's prose. The emulator knows the journals GOG and Steam sell with each game, and each game reads only its own: the two number their entries separately. The file is hashed here and the emulator is shown only the digest, and a journal it does not know is refused rather than guessed at, with its fingerprint printed so it can be identified — where each entry sits on the page is true of one file, and following those positions into another would produce nonsense rather than a warning.

Modern controls

The arrow keys and Esc work across the whole game, beside its own letter shortcuts, and whatever is selected is drawn as a white block, the colour this game lights its own selections in, so it reads without telling colours apart. Walking is a mode: choose Move on the exploring bar, and the arrows walk until you go back to it.

How to use it. It is on from the start; click the picture so the game has the keyboard. Every key it adds is listed under Keys below. To play with the game's own keys and colours, switch it off on the Enhancements tab of Options, on the player's toolbar.

The game takes a command by its first letter, and its arrows work on some screens and not on others. With this on, Left and Right move along a command bar, Up and Down move through a list, the main menu and the party, and Esc answers No. Exploring a town or a dungeon, the party's bar starts on Move, where Area was, since the automap is the overhead view now; at the main menu the number keys 1 to 8 select a party member, and the party list there shows each member's number. The overland is a journey from place to place off a list, and keeps the game's own bar: Left and Right step it, and Up and Down step the list of places. Every letter shortcut still works, and switched off, the game's keys and colours are exactly as they were. A few places keep the game's own keys on purpose: in a fight a turn opens on the move, so the arrows step the fighter there, and in Modify Left and Right change a score.

Message pause

A fight's lines and the game's other passing messages stay up long enough to read, and any key moves them on.

How to use it. Nothing to switch: it is on from the start. Press any key, or a controller button, to move a message on before its time is up. How long a message stays is the number beside its switch on the Enhancements tab of Options, on the player's toolbar, from 0 to 10 seconds in quarter-second steps; 0 keeps the game's own pause and only lets a key end it.

The game shows each line of a fight and some scripted lines for a set pause and then moves on by itself, without waiting for a key. In this player there is next to no drawing around that pause, and a fight's line stands for under half a second at the game speed the shipped saved games start with. With this on, each of those pauses lasts at least a second, and any key ends it early. The key is used up ending the pause, so it does not also answer whatever comes next. Nothing else slows down: the walk and the animations keep their speed, and a monster's approach, a death in a fight and the frames of a picture that moves keep the game's own timing.

A fanfare at the start

A short piece of music, Five Sigils, written for Amber Folio, plays on the Tandy sound chip while the game starts.

How to use it. Nothing to switch: it is on from the start, and plays every time the game boots, a reset included. Browsers keep sound off until you click, tap or press a key, so when the game starts by itself on a return visit you hear the piece from your first click or key. To go without it, switch it off on the Enhancements tab of Options, on the player's toolbar: a piece already playing stops at once, and it stays off at every boot after.

With this on, a piece of about thirty-nine seconds in D minor plays on the Tandy sound chip from the moment the loading is done, on through the game's titles. It was written for this project, and nothing in it is the game's. The game makes one sound of its own in its titles, at their fourth picture; the piece plays on over it, so that one sound is not heard while the piece plays, and the piece plays to its end. A key that hurries the titles along does not stop it. After that, the first sound the game makes in play, a footstep or a door, ends it for good, and so does turning the game's sound off (Ctrl-S); the chip is then the game's again.

Lettering

An accessibility option: the game's text redrawn in a face made to be easier to read, for anyone who finds the original lettering hard going. A plain bold sans with a slashed zero, or the same face cut as if by a broad pen.

How to use it. It starts as Sans. To change it, open Options on the player's toolbar, go to Accessibility, and choose a face under Lettering: Original (the game's own), Sans or Chisel. What you choose is kept with your copy of the game. A new face shows as the game draws its next letters. What is already on the screen keeps its old face until the game draws it again, usually at your next key.

Sans. The game's lettering in a plain bold sans, with a slashed zero. Bold two-pixel strokes, drawn for this project.

Chisel. The same bold face with every stroke cut at an angle, as if by a broad pen. The sans's letters, with each stroke's ends cut on the slant.

The faces have bold two-pixel strokes and a zero that cannot be read as an O, so the game's letters and digits are easier to tell apart. Only the letters, digits and punctuation change — the game's frames and runes stay its own, its font is never altered, and Original brings its lettering back.

Answer the code wheel once

The game asks its copy-protection question, one character off its translation wheel, the first time you play. Answer it, and it is never asked again.

How to use it. Nothing to do: it is on from the start. The first time the game starts it asks its question; answer it and every later start goes straight to the menu. To be asked again once, open Options on the player's toolbar, go to Enhancements, and press Ask me again beside it; to be asked every time, switch it off there.

With this on and the question unanswered, the enhancement does nothing at all: the game asks exactly as it always did, and the seam only watches the program's own comparison. Answer correctly — off your wheel, your manual, or the code generator application the releases sold today ship instead of one — and it remembers that. Every launch after that steps over the call that draws the challenge, so the game goes from its titles straight to its menu; the game also asks again now and then as the party arrives somewhere on its overland journey, and an answered copy is not asked there either. It never answers the question for you, in either state. What this browser writes down is only that you answered, against the fingerprint of the program — not the question, not the answer, not the time — and it is kept here and nowhere else.

Modern controls adds these keys, and it is on from the start. Every key the game had still works beside them.

The game's own keys differ from Pool of Radiance's in a few places, with or without Modern controls.

In every game, the key below Esc, to the left of 1, is Esc too: useful in a browser that leaves full screen on Esc, and on an iPad keyboard, which has no Esc.

The game plays with a controller too: the enhancements page says which button does what, and how to change them.

With screen reader support on, Ctrl+Alt+R reads the whole screen aloud, and so does a controller’s right bumper; Ctrl+Alt+W, or the left bumper, says where the party is (in a fight, whose turn it is and where the enemies are), and Ctrl+Alt+M reads what is explored around it a row at a time (in a fight, what stands next to whoever is acting). The enhancements page says what it reads and what it cannot.

Curse of the Azure Bonds is sold today as:

• Forgotten Realms: The Archives — Collection Two — GOG (opens in a new tab)
• Forgotten Realms: The Archives - Collection Two — Steam (opens in a new tab)

For most titles the link buys a collection rather than the single game.

• Imports a party from Pool of Radiance.
• Exports its party to Secret of the Silver Blades.

Carrying characters from one game to the next is something the games were built for, and the player does the copying for you. Play Pool of Radiance here first, so that this browser keeps its saved games. Then open Saves on the toolbar of Curse of the Azure Bonds’s player and choose Bring a party from Pool of Radiance: it lists the characters this browser keeps for that game, and copies the ones you pick into Curse of the Azure Bonds’s save folder.

The game itself does the rest. At Curse of the Azure Bonds’s party menu chooseAdd Character to Party and then Pool, and add each character from the list it shows. They arrive as the game’s own import brings them, without their items. Nothing is changed in Pool of Radiance, and its saved games stay as they were.