archive.worldofdragon.org

This game, both .CAS and .WAV seems to behave very weirdly in xRoar. As I wander around dropping boulders, the man disappears and then odd things happen like the screen scrolling around on its own.

Anyone else having such problems playing this? I may have an original tape of it to see if it's a bad transfer. Or does it need a special loading command?

A weird one - seems to work fine on a real Dragon, but both XRoar & T3 screw up if you play it with the keyboard (ok with joystick).

Something to investigate...

Ah yes, perfect, that explains in a single sentence something that has had me tearing my hair out throughout today.

I *knew* that when I tested it, after I downloaded it about 7 months ago, it worked. It worked fine. I wandered around taking loads of screenshots of it and if there had been any weird behaviour I would have noticed.

Of course, I was playing it with an (emulated) joystick on that occasion.

I couldn't understand until now what I'd actually been doing differently!

Ok it's weirder. It depends on the position of the right joystick (X axis only, I think).

If it's pushed all the way to the left, keypresses don't register, if it's all the way to the right, everything's ok. If it's somewhere in the middle (which tends to be how XRoar reports an unconnected joystick), weird behaviour all round.

Verified on a real machine! First time I tested, I didn't have a joystick attached, and it looks like (on my machine anyway), a disconnected joystick registers maximum for the X axis of the right joystick. The other axes seem to float closer to centre, but that could be something to do with the BASIC JOYSTK function I used to test it.

However did this make it past quality control... (edit: of course, it might not have in this state - still might be worth trying a dump of an original tape)

I have uploaded a bug fix release to the Uploads section.

Cool - works well.

Apart from that weird bug (really, how did it not get caught?), it's not a bad game really - especially for Blaby!

Could do with reacting to controls a little quicker, but I think that's at least partly because the whole thing runs just a little slow. It's no Repton, but it's a nice puzzle game.

sixxie wrote:it's not a bad game really - especially for Blaby!

There is a review of this game on page 6 of the September 1986 issue of Dragon User magazine.