Old adventure games running in dos mode
- From: "JM Casey" <crystallogic@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:22:13 -0400
Hey everyone.
I recently was looking at some old textfiles and got a bout of nostalgia. I
used to play these games on the Apple II back in the 80s called Eamon
Adventures, and I learned that there was a port available for PC. It includes a
great many of the games (many of which I hadn't played before) and is written
in the basic language. There's no windows interpreter provided, and the
developer recommends qbasic, a Microsoft DOS interpreter.
Now, I've been having some frustrating problems. I *think* I've successfully
gotten the software to run on one machine. My home configuration isn't very
different, only I'm using JAWS 9 here instead of 10...as this is very old
software I doubt very much whether this makes a difference. I'm running Windows
XP. I am comfortable with using the JAWS cursor and, while I haven't had to use
many DOS programs, I usually have little difficulty. The qbasic program itself
runs fine on this machine. However, when I try to run the main .bas file, I
can't get JAWS to read a damn thing. This is very strange because I actually
got it working on here and was using it just fine until I decided to play a
second adventure. At this point I noticed that the ends of words in the
introductory screen were being truncated, and when the intro was over, I
suddenly lost focus and could not get it back no matter how I tried. The reason
I am most puzzled is that I was having these problems to begin with, before I
actually got the thing working. I looked up some stuff online and it seems some
users at the Audyssey forum as well as the Audiogamers one have successfully
used this software, which doesn't surprise me. I followed some recommended
steps, like changing the text width specified in the .bas file from 80 to 40
columns. I also have been using alt-enter, which apparently toggles between
window and full-screen mode..the software defaults to full-screen, which JAWS
isn't happy with. In any case, alt-enter seemed to solve my problem earlier,
but now all it seems to do is either nothing or start speaking my desktop
shortcuts. The game/qbasic window appears to be blank except for the title, and
virtual buffer says "no text". I'm really getting that frustrated, annoyed
feeling that comes up when unexplained computer maladies occur, exacerbated by
the fact that this was working more or less fine a while ago.
Anyone familiar with this software? Alternatively, any hints about using dos
mode programmes like Qbasic with JFW? How about a completely compatible windows
interpreter? I have actually searched for one of these but both that I've tried
so far, while claiming compatibility, crash with errors when attempting
execution of the basic code.
Thanks in advance.
JM
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