Post by nuclear in Deus Heist jam comments

MS-DOS Game Jam #2 » Entries » Deus Heist

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I tried to run this game on two retro-PCs, a pentium with DOS 6.22 and a pentium3 with whichever version of DOS came with windows 98 SE. I even tried it under windows 98 in a DOS vm86 window, but everywhere I got a blank screen. It wasn’t stuck, exiting with ESC worked in all cases, but it failed to show anything other than a blank screen. I also tried both VGA and CGA modes.

I played it a bit in dosbox and I love the sight mechanics. The fluidity of dynamic “fog of war” is really cool. But it’s a shame I can’t run it on the real machine. Let me know if I can do anything to help debug this.

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GRG4 years ago

Dangit! I really need to invest in some proper hardware to test these projects on. :(

Must be something to do with setting the 8x8px character graphics mode.

I'm glad you like the sight mechanic! I'll get some real hardware set up and get it fixed.

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nuclear4 years ago

Plus it’s much more satisfying running what you wrote on real hardware :)

I have an alternative to suggest however. PCem is a very accurate emulator, and indeed I just tried your game in PCem and exhibits exactly the same issue as the real computer does. At the start of this jam a couple of months back, I posted in the “community” section, a handy archive including a PCem disk image with DOS 6.22 and a bunch of devtools pre-installed, as well as a PCem binary I compiled for GNU/Linux: https://itch.io/jam/dos-game-jam-2/topic/692522/disk-image-with-dos-devtools

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GRG4 years ago

I've still a lot to learn about DOS development! Weirdly, it works fine on a FreeDOS machine I've got, but not on Win98 and PCem shows up the problem for me too.

Thanks for the offer of help - I'll try stripping it back to narrow down the problem, and pull together a larger collection test environments, starting with your PCem tools!

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