Chill Manor - Fast Facts

The following are a bunch of miscellaneous facts relating to Chill Manor that are not noteworthy enough to get their own page. Consider this page a crash course of useless manor information!

Fact Links:

Cheat Code Remnants -- Empty Threats -- The Lost Cutscenes -- Out-of-Bounds Clipping Crash -- Release Date "Investigation" -- A Scrapped Sell Screen

Cheat Code Remnants

There are a couple of interesting entries within CHILL.INI that imply the existence of cheat codes within Chill Manor. They are as follows (with their keys added in paranthesis for clarification):

    ENTER_CHEAT             0x2e (C) 
    KILL_ALL                0x3f (F5)
    RECHARGE_LIFE           0x40 (F6)
    RECHARGE_MAGIC          0x41 (F7)
    

However, I've tried to enter a combination of these keys during gameplay to no avail. Perhaps it's only activated specific sequence of inputs like the cheats for Math Invaders? Or maybe the code dedicated to them got removed before release, who knows.

Empty Threats

Levels 14 and 18 (The Catacombs of Civilization and The Hall of Time, respectively) are a bit special. Two of the pages in each hall essentially warn the player that, if they do not have all of the pages before going past a certain Time Key door, they'll vaguely be in trouble. Is this true? Will the player be softlocked if they go through those doors without all the pages?

Nope. They're empty threats. There are teleporters in both levels that bring the player to and from its "halves", meaning that the player cannot be softlocked if they enter the second half without any pages. There isn't even an increase in enemies or instant game over situation. Perhaps the teleporters weren't there earlier in development, and the message was kept in for unknown reasons?

The Lost Cutscenes

Within the data of the game's main executable, CHILL.EXE, are two lists that name all of the cutscene files. Both of them reference "win1-6" and "lose1-2" cutscenes that aren't in the files of Chill Manor, let alone play during gameplay. The first can be found at 8AB40:

win1.ani
win2.ani
win3.ani
win4.ani
win5.ani
win6.ani
win.pcx
lose1.ani
lose2.ani
lose.pcx
    

The second list can be found at 8D173, and has new cutscenes - logo.ani (the Animation Magic logo from I. M. Meen) and the three oph cutscenes used in-game - as well as a slightly different order:

black.pcx
logo.ani

(data for oph1, oph2, and oph3)

win.pcx
win1.ani
win2.ani
win3.ani
win4.ani
win5.ani
win6.ani
lose.pcx
lose1.ani
lose2.ani
    

The existence of these lists means one of two things; Chill Manor once had six "win" cutscenes and two "lose" cutscenes instead of one of each, or it's a leftover from an earlier/unreleased title. Probably another leftover from John Dark, to be honest...

Out-of-Bounds Clipping Crash

Chill Manor is a less stable game than I. M. Meen - at least, if you play it on a DOS emulator like DOSBox. It occasionally likes to crash to a not-quite-DOS prompt that you can't escape from or type anything into, for seemingly no reason at all. Fortunately, I found one of reasons why this keeps happening.

If you decide to play Chill Manor, make sure that you do NOT hold down any movement/action key while changing between gameplay and menus! This includes things such as the automap and the page correction screen. What'll happen is that the movement key will continue to register as being inputted while (I assume) the game has temporarily disabled wall collision. Therefore, you'll be able to clip through walls. If you end up outside of a valid area (i.e. anywhere you can walk to in-game), you'll either get stuck or crash the game outright. This seems to be tied to the amount of cycles the game is running at; reducing them will also reduce the chances of the clipping glitch happening.

On a positive note, you can use this glitch to clip through key doors, though I haven't got the timing down at all. I've only had it happen twice as of writing?

Release Date "Investigation"

Much like every other "main" game on this site, I decided to perform a bit of release date investigation on Chill Manor. The Internet says that it was released on October 16th, 1996, but is there any truth to this? Well... from what I've found, I can confirm 2/3rds of that statement!

We have only four pieces of evidence regarding the release month of Chill Manor, which is why it doesn't have a separate page like all the other games. Let's start with the most vague date, found on Capitol Multimedia's old website:

Here, it lists Chill Manor as having a release period in the fall of 1996. This lines up with that October date, though it must be kept in mind that Fall lasts around three months and could've been released in any of them. Fortunately, we can get a bit more specific with the rest of the evidence.

The next bit of evidence comes from the game's shareware demo; its sell screens note that the game was going to be released in November 1996. Neat! It seems like this mystery has been solved... or has it? While it's possible that the game WAS released in November, there's slightly more evidence to suggest that Chill Manor was released in October and had its release date moved forwards for unknown reasons.

Evidence #1: There is a date associated with the game's ISBN number. If you plug the number into certain ISBN lookup sites, it returns with a month of October 1996. This is the same month used by the ISBN number of a re-release of I. M. Meen that happened around the same time as Chill Manor's release. This evidence also confirms - without any doubt - that these two were released around the same time, much like TFoE and TWoG. (As of writing, there's an old Amazon listing for Chill Manor that has the ISBN number and October month... so there's that, too!)

Evidence #2: In the October 1996 issue of the magazine Videogame Advisor, Chill Manor is listed as having a release month of October (keep in mind the magazine is monthly and was probably written around September). This date is unchanged from the September 1996 issue, which ALSO had October for its release month. By the time the November issue rolled around, Chill Manor had been removed from this list, so it was very likely out by that point.

With this all in mind, I do believe that Chill Manor was released in October of 1996... though if there's any more evidence for a November release, I'd like to see it.

A Scrapped Sell Screen

There's an unused file within the shareware demo for Chill Manor. In the folder RES\ is the file COPYOF~1.LAB, which is actually an unused variant of the second sell screen (COMESN1.LAB). Here's a comparison of the two:

Early (unused) screen on left, final (used) screen on right

As you can see, the Title Code and 888 # VDN/Promo Key numbers are completely different in COPYOF~1.LAB. They were changed because the numbers actually belong to Math Invaders and NOT Chill Manor, the product actually being advertised. Fortunately, someone noticed this and changed the numbers to their correct versions... almost. Turns out, they got the last number of the Title Code wrong - it should be 401133 instead of 401131. The title code for I. M. Meen ends with a 1, so it's possible a developer confused the two while replacing the old number.
(They also left behind some stray pixels, too!)