I am suspecting this to be an interpreter issue. Can you try to launch the game in DOS Frotz instead and see if that works? That would help me a lot. With release 13 I basically switched to Infocom‘s Z5 interpreter as it has a much lower memory footprint but I guess it has issues. I previously bundled Frotz
Not sure why that happens with the BAT file to be honest. While I haven’t created it on real hardware it definitely has the DOS Codepage 437 encoding and should work without issues in theory.