The Dink Network

Hello, everyone.

In case anyone's wondering what it used to be like to fight the final boss in Dink Smallwood v1.05, I recorded a 1600x900 video of myself doing this without the flame bow. Keep in mind that I didn't record any of the many failed attempts before this one attempt, which proved to be successful.

I do not have as much knowledge of the original game as the people who played it over and over, so please bear with me if you think I'm bad at this.

Sadly, I didn't record the fight against the Goblin Chief (maybe I'll do it at some point), but it was also rather difficult. The rest of the game was relatively easy though, to be honest.

Ducklord vs v1.05 Seth (no flame bow)

You not casting your fully recharged hellfire is very triggering.

Was this using a DirectX wrapper, or an old PC? I was under the impression that anything before 1.07 ran far too fast on a Pentium 4 or newer.

You not casting your fully recharged hellfire is very triggering.

Seth seemed to have far more defense and (touch) attack when playing this version of Dink Smallwood. When I played v1.06 years ago, I remember being able to punch him to death with the herb boots, which wasn't even remotely possible here despite my high attack stat. It's been a while since I recorded the video, but IIRC I couldn't even scratch him with the Hellfire spell. The only thing that Hellfire might be good for would be interrupting Seth's explosion spell, and that wasn't really needed here.

Was this using a DirectX wrapper, or an old PC? I was under the impression that anything before 1.07 ran far too fast on a Pentium 4 or newer.

Porteus Linux with custom kernel and Wine (the default Porteus kernel refuses to run 16-bit programs so I used my custom kernel with 16-bit support which I built specifically for a 16-bit game - I figured it might be needed for the v1.05 installer, no idea whether it was indeed necessary though). I used slapt-get to install OBS Studio to record this. I did this on an old ASUS PC that I bought around 13 years ago; it has an NVidia video card, if you want to know. I could probably replay v1.05 on my brand new PC with Tuxedo OS (using Wine once again), if I really wanted to.

EDIT : I also had to use Fluidsynth so that I could listen to the MIDI files in-game.

Seth seemed to have far more defense and (touch) attack when playing this version of Dink Smallwood.

You're quite right. I went and checked:

//v1.05
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 50);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 300);
sp_defense(&current_sprite, 50);

//v1.06
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 30);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 300);
sp_defense(&current_sprite, 25);

Wow, that's quite the change. 25 defence and 20 touch damage difference. I didn't realize things were changed that much for v1.06.

Can you really say you've even beaten Dink unless you beat the v1.05 version?! I think not. (Ergo, I've never beaten Dink...)

This really explains why some walkthroughs recommended using the Heavy Bow and praying for power shots. (Incidentally, what you're doing in the video.) I always thought that was stupid advice because it's much easier to hack Seth down with the light sword, but it's a different story with the original stats.

Mog really has been severely downgraded for the BABY VERSION as well:

//1.05
sp_defense(&current_sprite, 8);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 30);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 10);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 80);

//1.06
sp_defense(&current_sprite, 4);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 20);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 8);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 50);

Thank you for checking, Scratcher. That would certainly explain why I was unable to do more than 1 damage to Seth with the Herb Boots even though I had 35 attack points.

And yes, Mog (and the goblin guards - I wonder if they used to be stronger in v1.05 as well ? maybe I'll check at some point) were quite hard also. I'm not sure I would have been able to defeat the guards if I hadn't tricked them into attacking each other. Given that you barely have any space to move around the screen, these goblin fights were difficult; but unlike the Seth fight which was fun, these were just plain annoying.

For yeoldetoast : I managed to get Dink Smallwood v1.05a running on the Ubuntu-based "Tuxedo OS" Linux distro, with Lutris. I picked a 32-bit Wine prefix, deactivated every single DXVK option in the settings, turned on dgVoodoo2, and used taskset to slow down Lutris/Dink Smallwood to an acceptable speed, and voila. Fluidsynth is still required, I personally use this soundfont : https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/400, which sounds closest to the Windows soundfont I had when I first played Dink Smallwood all those years ago. The audio CD tracks also work fine, which is nice (yes, I actually had to burn a Mixed Mode CD for this).

EDIT : v1.05 stats for "hammer" goblins if I got it right :

sp_defense(&current_sprite, 2);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 15);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 10);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 40);

And for "scythe" goblins :

sp_defense(&current_sprite, 6);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 25);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 10);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 80)

I'm off to check the v1.06 stats, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were lower. Just look at those stats for the "scythe" enemies...

EDIT 2 :

v1.06 stats - "hammer" goblins :

sp_defense(&current_sprite, 1);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 15);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 10);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 40);

Virtually the same except defense is a bit lower. However...

"scythe" goblins :

sp_defense(&current_sprite, 2);
sp_strength(&current_sprite, 20);
sp_touch_damage(&current_sprite, 8);
sp_hitpoints(&current_sprite, 60);

This explains why I thought these were stronger in v1.05.