Coded blue.

Thursday 1 January 2009

Screenshot anime Kanokon

Pic of the day: I wish that this will be a wholesome year, and not one where I stay up till 5 AM each night playing Daggerfall. So far, however...

Harpy New Year!

Remember Daggerfall? During the first years of this journal, it was a pretty steady part of my life. Games and other hobbies came and went, but Daggerfall remained, or at least returned every few days. Kind of like a marriage, I guess. Not extremely exciting but kind of always there.

Then fate conspired against me. I let Supergirl borrow my Daggerfall computer (for unrelated reasons than Daggerfall, admittedly) and her father threw it away instead of returning it to me when she moved back home. Being a complete and utter layman in these things, he was probably not aware that computers can not only be too old to do certain things, but also too new! Daggerfall is an MS-DOS game, but had the bad luck of being launched at about the same time as Windows 95, the first Windows to be a real operating system and not just a graphical front-end to the MS-DOS operating system. Still, the game was playable with some fiddling under Windows 95 and Windows 98. My last Win98 machine was the infamous Toshiba laptop, a Monday machine if I ever saw one. I had only had it long enough to send away the previous one before it started breaking down. Even so, and despite it being a laptop, I kept playing Daggerfall on it as long as I could. Bad things happened to my wrist, but I kept playing until the machine just plain refused to work anymore. By then the warranty was expired as well. So, I have lived a Daggerfree life for some years now. Until today.

I have kept hearing rumors about people playing it in DOSBox, an MS-DOS emulator that runs under Windows (and Linux, and probably on Macs as well). The program goes between the old games (or other programs) and Windows, creating an imaginary near-perfect MS-DOS as a pocket universe in Windows. The games see the same environment they were made for, even though they don't actually have the machine to themselves as they believe. Their commands are translated and passed on to Windows, then the answer is translated back so the games never notice.

I have tried this in the past - after all, it worked with Master of Magic - but despite following intricate descriptions on the web, I never got it to work. Until today. Actually, it was the phrase "Harpy New Year" that made me try again. I saw the first "Happy New Year" messages on my LiveJournal friends list, and once again the phrase "Harpy New Year" came to mind. (I believe I first learned that from Piers Anthony, of Xanth fame. He is as punny in English as I used to be in Norwegian.) Be that as it may, I looked up a few web sites again, found the instructions to be excessively cumbersome, and decided to Just Try.

I started DOSBox (0.72 - earlier versions may not work for this) and mounted a folder on my C drive as the C drive in DOSBox. (It is not recommended to use the root level, because there may be important stuff there you don't want to mess with. I just called mine "Dosgames". I also mounted the CD driver as D. There are simple instructions to do this when you get DOSBox from Sourceforge. (I am not going to link here - web adresses come and go, but Google remains. Until something better shows up, I suppose.) Anyway, contact me if you get stuck. I may or may not be able to help, but I will certainly try.

When you put the CD in, it will auto-run a graphics installer. Not to be used! Almost hung my PC. Instead I went to the DOSBox window I had opened before, changed to the CD drive, and ran Install there. It did not work with huge install on my machine, but I ran a small install and later copied all the content of the D:/dagger/arena2 folder to the corresponding C:/dagger/arena2. You can do this in DOS or Windows. Then in the C:/Dagger folder, I edited (with Notepad, in Windows) the Z.CFG file, changing the CDPATH variable to point to C instead of D. Just that easy. I can now start the game by running the command
FALL Z.CFG

There is more to explore in DOSBox, such as making a list of commands to run when the program starts. But there is official documentation for that. Suffice it to say that the game now starts faster and runs smoother than it ever did on my old machines. My unlikely dream that I may play Daggerfall for the rest of my life (not all the time, obviously!) is no longer so far fetched. Although I actually hope my life will be longer than that. But it is still amazing after 10 years.

You could say it is like getting-back-together sex only without the sex. But with the staying up till 5AM making noise. That, at least, is unlikely to continue if Daggerfall and I resume our steady relationship from days of yore. I used to stop at midnight, to avoid the scary RPG dreams.


Previous <-- This month --> Next?
One year ago: Imaginary friends online
Two years ago: SD: Colors and shadows
Three years ago: Like killing your pets
Four years ago: "I have nothing"
Five years ago: Gamey new year!
Six years ago: New Years – who cares?
Seven years ago: Unfocused
Eight years ago: Mars Now!
Nine years ago: Welcome to the future!
Ten years ago: A mild new year

Visit the archive page for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


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