I approve of your taste, sir, and would enjoy continuing this conversation 
Thanks, me too.
These are interesting games and I've spent a lot of time thinking about them and playing them.
Funny you mention this as I was going to mention Dungeon Hack which is basically Eye of the Beholder...with randomly generated dungeons.
I've never played that.. I believe I was still trying to find something to play on my Amiga by the time this game was out.
Dungeon Master is really a pretty clever game though, ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and well, one of those games where it looks like the developers didn't feel too hindered by what other RPGs were doing. They just went ahead and made their dungeon game!
I remember having read an article in Edge quite a few years back on the making of DM.. and if I remember correctly, the developer team really figured out they were on to something when they ditched the idea of going into a separate view / screen when picking up stuff on the floor and said: why not just pick them up and manipulate them in the game view. So, even my sister, who was 10 years old at the time played DM and finished it, because it was so easy and sraightforward to figure out.
There was another game I wanted to mention on the subect of graphics, because I couldn't think of the name earlier, and that's this old Psygnosis game Obitus. It's not a very good game, not much of a dungeon crawler, and the levels are seperated by awful sidescrolling sections (oh, Psygnosis 
) but it's notable because the tiles use 8 directional movement. This is a cool idea, and it makes the forests seem a lot less mechanical (even when you're running into impassible bush walls all over).
I haven't played that either. The logo is SO Psygnosis.
Looks good though and the art is very atmospheric.
"E", "F", and "G" were a little surprising because I hadn't considered them, but of course walls parallel to the player should be visible off to the sides as well and the perspective is notably different. In EoB games they usually fade to black by "D."
In DM there's a hint of that part of the wall to be seen, in EOB it's just black.
So tenative restrictions are to do this: a wall set (16 colours, image size...variable), a background (same colours as wall set), 4 character portraits (16 colours for all, 32x32 pixels each), an interface (16 colours again, basically a full 320x200 screen that this viewport and the portraits would fit into somewhere), and maybe a monster set (4 directions at 3 sizes, or whatever). Or maybe do a few wall sets (wall, door, ruined wall, etc.) and some overlay objects like torches or grates or what-have. Roll the palette for the overlays into the one for the monster set.
Anyway, this is very flexible and I'm just describing it so you have something to chew on. I very much want people's input on this if they're interested in participating. Colour restrictions are just theoretical. The games are actually 256 colours and it looks like often they use a global palette, but I usually find it more difficult to be clever with virtually no restrictions like that, so I think it's a good idea to make it something a bit challenging.
Sounds good. I was thinking of something similar. 16 colours for the bg and monsters and a separate 16 colour palette for the interface and character portraits.
....
And some games we haven't mentioned yet: Ishar 1-3. Ishar 3 has got some really good art and some not so good.. photo traces for some characters I believe. Then, Abandoned Places 1-2 and Bloodwych, which wasn't much of a game but had a two-player option on a split screen which was kind of interesting.
