While I’m waiting on legal paper work, I’ve been doing several things in the last couple of weeks:
- I’ve pulled out the source code and tried to figure out what I’ve got and don’t have. Surprisingly, I think I have most everything except the original sound recordings (pity, I think many were 16-bit and this will leave us with their 8 bit final versions).
- Looked for original documents and what-not for fun and found the 2nd rev of the game notes, but have not found the original hilarious versions. (David’s 1st set of notes would have been amazing to read to others because it contained so many strange ideas)
- Setup a DOS Box configuration that works with the original tools to compile the code and to create the resource files. It works and works quite well.
- Messed a bit with getting the debug version of DOS Box to let me see where crashes are occurring. Without proper debug files showing me the map from assembly to C code, this is, well, annoyingly NOT useful. It just helps me know that it crashed and a general location. Very painfully slow to use.
- Got the old Watcom debugger working with the DOSBox build of the game and could actually use it to step through the code. However, with DOSBox’s limited 25 line display (I can’t get 50 line DOS to work), this is also painful as I can only see about 5 lines of code most of the time. But it works.
- Downloaded Open Watcom v1.9 and got the executable compiling from Windows tools instead of inside of DOSBox. I did this mostly because it is much faster to compile in native code instead of emulated DOSBox code. It works pretty good. Oh, and did I mention the game still runs with a new compiler.
- Compiled DOSBox. Was curious how hard that was. It took an evening, but now if I want to customize DOSBox for this project, I can. The more I consider options, this is becoming less necessary.
- Started porting the game over to Windows using the SDL. The SDL appears to be the best cross-platform tool out there and I like its simplicity. I’ll report more on this in another post. Android support for SDL is questionable, at best.
Things I’m still looking for or need to do,
- Original Ad. It’s around here, but I said I would post what our original PC Gamer magazine ad looked like.
- Still hoping I’ll find the original sound files on a disk somewhere.
- Got some Zip 100 disks I need to copy everything off of — before parallel ports totally disappear. Yes, I got the parallel version of the zip drive still. (Side note: I collect too much junk)
- Decide on how I want the networking to work — IPX or something else.
Amulets & Armor Developer 