The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor

An interactive Horror · By Stefan Vogt

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Problems with put commands

A topic by richardpickles created 86 days ago Views: 142 Replies: 8

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richardpickles86 days ago

I'm playing version 13 on DOS and am having serious issues with put commands. Minor spoilers ahead:-

This first occurred with trying to put the statuette in the panel. This refused to work no matter what I tried giving a "You probably wanted to say put something in something" message (even though that was exactly what I'd done). I ended up looking at the transcript, seeing that I hadn't picked up the torch elsewhere so I did that and it worked second time around.

I then had a similar issue with the plates and murals. I initially tried to place the Lindisfarne/Cuthbert plate first and got the same message. Checked the transcript again which did things in a different order and that then worked.

Now I'm trying to put the salt in the pouch and am getting the same error yet again. Also if I type get salt, it doesn't return a message at all. Not sure if I can even work my way around it this time but will keep trying.

richardpickles86 days ago

Had an idea that it might be fixing itself when my inventory changed. I dropped my spade and tried again and it let me take the salt.

richardpickles86 days ago

Very nearly got to the end but when I try to put the candles on the gravestone I get endless "You probably wanted to say put something in something" messages and can't finish the game. I can't clear this by dropping items.

I tried starting a fresh game in case it was my save that got corrupted and had the same errors again as soon as I got to the statuette part. The game appears to be unbeatable on DOS as far as I can see. I'm determined to see the end at this point so will try another version instead.

Stefan VogtDeveloper86 days ago

The game has definitely been completed many times by a plethora of players and it is the first time I am hearing about this issue. The story file is always the same for all target systems and you definitely don’t have these issues in the story file itself. So it must be something specific to either the DOS version or your local setup. Can you give me a bit more context? Are you using a real DOS machine? If so, which is it? In case you’re using emulation… Which emulator are you using on which operating system? I need to rule out emulation and/or hardware issues so I need to understand what’s going on. Do you use the interpreter that came bundled with the game‘s archive or do you use a different interpreter and just fire up the story file? If so, which interpreter are you using?

richardpickles85 days ago

I was using a 486SX with DOS 6.22. I'm just using a renamed copy of the dos folder included in the download copied to the c drives. I've since tried it on a PII with the same setup and get the same bug. So I tried a fresh download on DOSBox and I still get the same bug every time when I try to put the statuette in the panel. As far as I can see it's nothing to do with hardware and happens every single time without fail so it should be easy to reproduce. I didn't have the same issues on a CPC I'm glad to report.

There was another very minor issue on real DOS hardware in that the batch file doesn't work to launch the game. It looks like it's breaking the first line up into two parts when trying to run it. Opening it with edit, it looks normal enough. I removed the carriage return after the first line, put it back, saved again and it was fine. Maybe just opening and saving would have done the trick? Not sure what the issue is there - it works in DOSBox. I thought that maybe it's using some unsupported text encoding format but that's speculation.

Stefan VogtDeveloper85 days ago (1 edit)

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.

richardpickles85 days ago

I've just played through the whole game with frotz254 from https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/. That's a 16 bit version I gather so should work on older systems too. Everything worked perfectly.

Stefan VogtDeveloper84 days ago

That’s great to know! So the Interpreter has bugs. I will revert back to Frotz! Thank you so much for your help in identifying the issue! Much appreciated!

Stefan VogtDeveloper27 days ago (1 edit)

Just a short update here from my side. Today, I released version 14 of Ghosts, which reverts back to Frotz as an interpreter. So this should be resolved. I also edited the .BAT files and resaved them using CodePage 437. I am not 100% sure if that solves the issue with the .BAT file you had but I hope so. I am actually not sure what else I could do here since essentially, a .BAT file is just a text file and it just looks right. The encoding might have been it though (escape sequences and line breaks etc. might affect DOS being not able to read it properly).

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The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor

Problems with put commands