The first I saw of Daggerfall was a demo on a CD for Terminator: Future Shock. It was like the single-dungeon demo you can download, but with a few differences. It had a different menu screen that had music. That music is floating around online. It also had a long-winded background story that probably made it into the manual for all I know. The other big thing is upon spawning in the dungeon I fell through the floor and drowned -- every time. I had to use a cheat just to get a look around the place.

The frustrating part is I don't have that Future Shock CD anymore. I probably gave it back to the friend who lent it to me. Anybody know if that demo is floating around online somewhere? It was different enough to be interesting. Are there more demos as well?

There are two demos for Daggerfall. The one you mentioned, and another that allows you to play on the island Betony, with certain limitation. But it's a lot bigger, and even with the limitations it should lasts for many, many hours.
You can find both the demos http://www.uesp.net/dagger/files/dagfiles.shtml.

And also, Daggerfall is up for free download now if you didnt know. Just go look on the Elder Scrolls site

(Yes, the whole game)

I should have mentioned that, but I have all of those. I've been happily playing Daggerfall since the day the download appeared. The thing is the demo on the Future Shock CD had differences from the ones available online.

Aha! I found it! There was a smaller, older demo mentioned in a bunch of FAQs from around the time Daggerfall was released. Googling the names of the zip files there finally led me to a site that has them. I found them http://www.giffer.com/public/dos/pdemo/demo0006.htm, labelled dagdemo1.zip through dagdemo6.zip.

It's very different from the demo that came out after the game's release. Things like the character generation, item maker, potion maker, etc. are available from the menu screen. They don't have any effect on your character in the dungeon. There is also the cool title music, a background story, some different controls, etc. Also, the combat is hilariously fast. You can swing your weapon as fast as you can physically move the mouse.

Anyway, if you want to try it, you can do these steps:

• Download all six of the zip files.
  
• Make a folder wherever you keep your games for DOSbox (eg. c:\dosgames\dagdemo).
  
• Extract the first zip file into this folder.
  
• Inside that folder make a folder called arena2.
  
• Extract the contents of dagdemo2.zip through dagdemo5.zip into arena2.
  
• Make a folder in arena2 called books.
  
• Extract dagdemo6.zip into books.
  
• In DOSbox mount your drive like you do for Daggerall.
  
• Navigate to the dagdemo folder by typing cd dagdemo
  
• type setsound to configure your sound. You can use different options, but if you're unsure the Soundblaster 16/AWE32 option will work for music and sound. Leave the port at default and it will detect the rest of the settings.
  
• When you're done and back at the prompt type dagger and the game will run.

Don't run the batch files that were included. They won't work with DOSbox.

Those are the dungeon crawling demos. I collected them all from different magazines. In each demo you start inside a dungeon with a pre-made character. Some dungeons have item makers, spell makers and store rooms. At first i thought there was an exit to be found so i played those demos endlessly but never found any exit. Saving is not possible which made it a very satisfying experience (similar to a roguelike) to clean one of those dungeons completely and collect some decent equipment.

It was a very cool experience at the time. Daggerfall dungeon crawling in full 3D with the HUGE dungeons, the flickering lights, the music, the special rooms, the caves, the underground rivers completely owned everything else.

Thats interesting, myezzz (they should have an emoticon with a monocle LOL)

I will have to try these out sometime soon... before the post gets lost in the void, and silently dissipates

I don't know if you knew this, but that's the Interactive Preview. It was released in stores before Daggerfall came out (a good while before, if I'm not mistaken, maybe late 1995). My brother bought a boxed copy, but unfortunately the box is long gone. I still have the CD floating somewhere around my apartment.

Daggerfall definitely felt a little "off" after playing the Interactive Preview and reading about what the final game was supposed to be. To this day, it's still one of my favorite games, but I always wonder what it would be like if they had completed it. Luckily, lucius seems to be taking this into his own hands, so it won't be too terribly long before we can play Daggerfall like it was meant to be played.

I also found that demo to be really hard. I'd like to hack the character's HP so that I can explore the rest of the dungeon, but I'm lazy. Does anyone know if there is an exit to the dungeon they used?

I had that one on my Future Shock CD -- well, my friend's CD. He let me borrow it because that game crashed nonstop on his machine at the time. Anyway, it wasn't playable for me. Every single time I tried I fell through the floor the instant I spawned, landed in water and drowned. I only got to see some of the dungeon by finding a cheat that did something similar to the TCL command in newer TES games.

Anyway, your right. It's crazy hard. You start with crappy stuff and have to fight liches and orc shamans! However, I noticed the enemies don't respawn if I pop back into the dungeon after dying -- or at least they didn't last time I was playing it. This made it easier, kind of stupid. I never found an exit, but I got tired of it and gave up trying.

And what's with the hide button in the inventory? Does that let me hide loot so the guards can't take it?

Hide was one of the many things removed from the game. You're right; it was probably meant to hide objects so that you could smuggle them (or some other illegal activity).

I wonder if Interkarma's programs will read that dungeon. I might be putting my Windows XP VM to use tonight...

Who's Lucius?..... I'd like to know. And the way Daggerfall was "meant" to be played?
Allllll-righty then?

You've not seen DaggerXL yet? Have a look: http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/

There's a thread about it around here, but most of the interesting discussion it happens on his forum.

I wonder if we can feed extra game data into that ancient preview demo. My guess is no, but it would be cool if we could, just to see what would happen. A few of the files are obviously different, even at first glance. I noticed the music with that demo is in .xmi files that are readily playable by Winamp.

EDIT: Well, the naive method for trying that certainly won't work. I tried running it with z.cfg changed to spawn in Privateer's Hold and with the 2.13 version of arena2. It kept spitting out errors about .cif files it couldn't find so I added them in. Finally it just gave me "Invalid command on line 1707." I figured something like that would happen if I tried that trick.

Okay! That looks really nice! I heard about DaggerfallXL once before, but I couldnt find any images back then. Alright, now you got me excited! If I could, I would help the guy in doing this project to get it out there faster. I cant wait for this.

A quick question though. Does the Daggerfall Free Download have any differences with the actual CD installation disc? I have the CD (by luck of finding it locally, thank the heavens lol) --- but with the CD, it has an "installation size". Does the free download have that? If any differences from having the actual CD?

It has no difference, other than the fact that it's not on a CD. It even has the same question about installation size in the installer.