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haha so

back in 2013, blizzard re-released Blackthorne as freeware using dosbox on battle.net

it.... was strange. if you hadn't played the game before then, you might not have noticed a bunch of glaring bugs, like missing sound effects and missing music in several places, including the intro. over the years, no one was able to figure out the cause, and the standard reply became "just download the original from a dos gaming site and play that instead"

it always kind of pissed me off that blizzard released a truly *great* game in this state, so tonight i decided to figure out what was causing the missing audio.

the first step was ruling out some audio configuration problems - except, blizzard stripped out the dos installer program from their release. no prob - I'll just grab a copy from an abandonware site. and so, I downloaded a fresh preinstalled copy of blackthorne from myabandonware.com and made sure the audio was configured properly.

... and surprisingly, the game still played with missing music in the intro and on the first level, just like the blizzard version.

on a hunch, i grabbed two original diskette images, and installed the game from scratch. i ran the audio configuration, ran the game, and - lo and behold - the music all worked fine.

.. which made me realize: blizzard's team so was fucking lazy that they copied the buggy pre-installed version of the game from an abandonware site, and rebadged it with a blizzard logo. apparently no one on the team was familiar enough with the game to realize that the audio didn't work at all. 🙄 a multi-billion dollar company.

so folks, if you want to play Blackthorne and enjoy the gorgeous music - grab the *disk images* here instead: https://archive.org/details/003030-Blackthorne

#dosGaming