Hi, everybody!
Santa here! Or at least someone who's secretly filling in his shoes!
(Shh! Don't tell anyone!)

Isn't this season great? 'Tis the season of giving, hope, love and all that bla bla bla stuff... So here's me giving you something (Not the finger), but a brand spankin' new unreleased game! And one you can actually play too!

I've been sitting on this thing for nearly 2 years. 2 years isn't that long a time!
I acquired this for a rather sizy, four digit, sum of money once. Sure stung, but I feel like I've long since recovered from that.
This data is not the 1:1 data from the original discs, but it's very much close to being so (just off by a few bytes). I've taken meassures to make sure this void will be filled in later. No worries. You might not even know what's missing until the rest comes out... unless I failed to catch some new glitches (hopefully not!)

What you're now getting is a fully playable (from start to end) copy of the unreleased PS1 port of Baldur's Gate. It weights in at a mighty 3 discs and is a surprisingly faithful and direct port of the original PC game. It requires a full memory card (15 blocks) to save, so make sure you've got one handy and prepared before you start playing! Those of you with emulators or PS3s w/virtual memory cards don't have to worry about that, though! Lucky people! It also has a nice RAM Save/Load feature. Which enables you to temporarily store a state save kind of thing in the system memory and load from there at any given time! Though... beware! The game does not feature a warning prompt for the ram options!

Also, unfortunately, the game is rather glitchy and crashes every once in a while. It seems to be more stable when it runs on actual hardware, rather than in emulators. One common issue is that the game may crash upon boot in emulators if it detects and auto-loads save data from a memory card... Just a general heads up on that one!

There are some things I wish I could've fixed (the unused Bioware logo is a nice starter), so I hope the community might be able to deal with some of them, I'm especially hopeful for this one thing; The game's disc swap points might not come with an automatic save point, thus making the game rather unplayable on a PSP in the long run, as the PSP's PS1 emulator doesn't properly recognize the disc swap points, thus a multi-disc eboot wont allow you to exchange disc w/out using the reset option... Portable Baldur's Gate would be nice, don't you think?


This release wouldn't have been possible had DRX not offered to take it in on http://www.hidden-palace.org and I'm sure there'll be a thread for it on the LostLevels forums too. These things rarely go by unnoticed over there. There are of course also some other people who've helped make this possible! You all know who you are, and if you feel I've hurt you by not mentioning your name - please contact me and I'll make sure your names evt. pop up somewhere in relation to this stuff!


Personally, I don't expect to get anything in return for this, but for those who're interested, I've got the in-development version of Capcom's Resident Evil 2 (aka. Resident Evil 1.5) and the canned PS1 port of The Journeyman Project - Pegasus Prime on my wishlist, but money would also be nice! After all, this wasn't cheap and is so far entirely out of my own pocket! ;)


Anyway, hope you all enjoy your present from this year's Secret Santa! I also hope you all enjoy this often so forgotten title and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Make sure to leave your thanks and holiday wishes in the comments sections or keep an eye on LostLevels.org, where I'm hoping someone will be paying their respect for this gem!