Dungeon Siege I and II

fearedbliss

fearedbliss

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I just got these in the mail today. I’ve heard good things about this game and I remember I had \"acquired\" a copy of DS II when I was little but I only opened it once and never played it again. I guess I was still too focused on Diablo haha. But it’s time to come back to DS and give it a shot. I’m really excited about it as well. From some review I saw, it seemed they said it was like a Baldur’s Gate Meets Diablo type of situation, which I can definitely see that. I’m attempting to back up all of these discs now with Alcohol 120%, they are old so I hope it all goes well.

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Unfortunately the DS II CDs are damaged from old age it seems so even trying to back them up yielded files that after installation, had corrupted archives. The game would start up but basically crash because of these corrupt files. I’ve initiated a return on eBay to the seller, and luckily I found another seller that was selling a \"Brand New / Sealed\" copy of DS II Deluxe Edition. The case has some wear and tear but it does have the tape on it still. But we’ll see once I get it.

As for the DS1, it seemed to install and start up fine. There were some warning messages about \"insufficient space\" or something at the end of each install disc (Total of 3), but I just clicked ignore because I know that I actually have plenty of storage space so it may just be some weird behavior of the old game being installed on a new system. I’m gonna have to be way more careful purchasing CD based media. It’s pretty sensitive. My goal is really to get working media and then immediately back it up because I know that essentially all CD media will most likely break one day. So as long as I can buy a legit copy that is still working, and that I can quickly make an Alcohol 120% dump of, I’ll be a happy camper even if it dies in my closet eventually. I’ll need to do more testing on DS1 to see if its really good and what not.. we’ll see what happens.

The more time goes by, the harder it is to own physical media but I’m determined to continue buying these old games as long as I can.

EDIT: So I did a full uninstall of DS 1 and 2 and I tried reinstalling DS1 again (DS2 is confirmed corrupted). I didn’t get any \"insufficient space\" messages anymore for any of the three discs and the game continued to start up fine and I was able to make a new character in both the original and the original’s expansion (Legends of Aranna). So far it seems my backups and everything went good for DS1.. so I think it may be safe for me to keep the DS1 discs and purchase. Hopefully no weird corrupt stuff happens whenever I get a chance to get deeper into DS1 game play lol, it would suck if I make it to end game and then some file was actually corrupted lol. Hoping for the best.

My DS1 install came with the following versions:

DS1 Version 1.1.1.1
DS1 Legends of Aranna Version 1.50

I also noticed that the game’s sound options had EAX. Turning it on said my hardware didn’t support it so I took the DSOAL from my D2 folder and threw it in the DS1 folder, and the EAX worked ;D.

EDIT2: The eBay seller accepted my refund request and sent over the refund :).
 
An update on this. Yesterday I got the new DS2 deluxe edition discs and noticed that they also had some light scratches on some of the discs. However these were brand new and sealed so I believe they happened because of old age and maybe transportation over that period of time. I tried to backup the discs and I noticed a lot of them were giving me errors. So I was like damn, maybe I can try using a combination of the old discs and the new discs and see if I can salvage them. This still yielded the same results. Then I had another idea.. I was like maybe instead of using this portable DVD slim drive (that connects to USB directly and doesn’t have an external power supply), I could try using my way more powerful external full size blu-ray drive which I’ve modified the firmware to turn it into a LibreDrive (so that I’m able to back up my blu-ray discs without the built into original firmware DRM trying to throttle the hell out of my blu-ray backups) and it also has its own power supply as well. After I did that, every single DS2 disc was able to be backed up with essentially no errors (excluding expected read errors due to the on disc copy protection). I was then able to install the game without any corruption issues and was able to load it up and start a new character as well. So I’m really happy now I have a full working set of backed up images for DS2. Today I will try and back up the original discs I got that I thought were corrupted.

This teaches an old lesson that I had forgotten which is that the drive you use to backup your media matters and that using crappy drives, especially without external power supplies, can yield really bad resulting images. The slim drives are probably good for basic media or for just basic reads from the discs, but if you are trying to do any sort of disc backups, especially for heavier content like a video game (rather than just ripping an audio CD), you really want to have something like an external, dedicated LibreDrive (if possible) with its own power supply.

If you don’t know what a LibreDrive is, you can take a look here .

EDIT: I was able to successfully back up all of the original Dungeon Siege II discs that I received that I thought were corrupted due to my old slim DVD drive. Learn from my mistakes folks. But also still make sure to try and find good condition discs, especially for classic games. The worst thing is receiving a set of discs with a valid cd key, but then the discs are faulty :(. I’ll be redumping a bunch of my existing CDs using the new drive just in case and to also increase the quality of my backup images.
 
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