Subj : Re: Infocom games user display issues...
To   : Nathanael Culver
From : Shane O'Neill
Date : Sun Sep 08 2019 08:10 pm

 NC> Over at the Interactive Fiction Archive under Infocom/patches are patches
 NC> allowing you to convert any version of any Infocom game to any other
 NC> version.
 NC> 
 NC> https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/patches/

Well I did some quick testing tonight to see if I could isolate the issue to
a point that one of you all might be able to help some more.

One game that will not display on the user end but does on the host machine is
"A Mind Forever Voyaging" but in this scenario will refer to it as AMFV.

One game that does display and work for BOTH the user and of course on the host
machine is "Hollywood Hijinx" again in this scenario will refer to it as
HOLLYWO.

I also tried every FROTZ i could for DOS (being my Mystic is on a windows 7
32bit machine) from http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/dos.html. In the end I
went with DOS FROTZ v2.40 on there.

So knowing HOLLYWO already works on my bbs (using its own .com intrerperter) I
created a test menu game option in mystic to call up the following
configurations with the results:

Option 1:
 using FROTZ 2.40 set to display monochrome HOLLYWO - WORKED 100% for user
Option 2:
 using FROTZ 2.40 set to display color text HOLLYWO - FAILED to work for user
Option 3: 
 using FROTZ 2.40 set to display monochrome AMFV - FAILED to work for user
Option 4:
 using FROTZ 2.40 set to display color test AMFV - FAILED to work for user

* Note in all these options the games always work/show up on the mystic
server/host machine.

So that is crude I know, I got these same results with the other FROTZ
versions available from that site also.  Again this makes me think the issue
of no display on the user end for the game AMFV (and others that have this
issue) is the .DAT file of the game (being the .dat is the whole game).  That
is where I figured the game version is causing this.

Hope all that makes some sense and helps shed light on the issue, now I wait
and do look forward to any/all input from you all!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
 * Origin: 8-Bit Boyz BBS! -=[ bbs.8bitboyz.com port:6502 ]=- (1:305/3)

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