Playing from disk on PC

[Ze_ro]

I've been trying to set up a disk for an IBM machine that will automatically load a mouse driver and boot straight into the game. So far, it works, and the game loads up fine. Except that any time I try to play (whether I start a new game or try to load a previous one), it keeps complaining that I don't have the "master disk" in drive A:

I saw an answer to this on the main site that I should just install it onto the hard drive, but that's just the opposite of what I want in this case. How do I convince the game to work anyways? Is there a file that it looks for, or a certain label that the disk needs or something? All I did to install DM on the disk was copy the files from the hard drive onto it... is there some other way that will work?

--Zero

[Simon]

The problem may be that you're running the executable file when you're not in the same folder.. for example, if you have the Dungeon Master files installed to A:\DM but you are running the executable from a batch file that is on a:\, then DM will probably look on the root of the disk for the files it needs, then complain when it cannot find them.

Instead, to run the game, make sure that in the batch file it does:
cd DM
DM.exe

ie it changes the directory to the one containing the dungeon master files.

Hope this helps!

[chiefy]

how is the game going to save from disc ?

the program will attempt to save the "game save" onto the disc
as this is impossible, anybody playing from disc cannot "save"

[beowuuf]

Insert a blank disk into the drive : )
Ah, the good old amiga days when i had 10 DM save disks or more...

[Ze_ro]

Well, all the files are in the root directory of the floppy (That is, the executable is a:\dm.exe), so there shouldn't be any directory issues (I actually tried sticking everything in a directory named FTL (which was where it installed onto the HD), but that didn't change anything)... As for saving, I don't see any reason that it couldn't save right onto the disk. I had a saved game when I copied everything onto the disk, and there's still about 80k free (there's a file named dmsave.dat, which I assume is the save, and is only 48k). You can't ever save more than one game anyways, right?

Maybe I should try using the Dos 'subst' command to rename the floppy drive to C: and see if that works...

--Zero

[Lunever]

Well, but is your current directory that of the disk? Maybe the problem is something as simple as an "A:\" line to be inserted on top/end of the batch file. Or Maybe the install file of DM specifies something in the game to access the drive only it was installed to. So maybe you should try to run for example the install file from B:\ and target A:\ .

[Wil]

The game needs 2*48K, because it makes a backup of your last save before writing over it. But maybe that's not the issue. :(

[Ze_ro]

Well, I tried using subst, but to no avail... What I did was to "subst c: a:\", after which I can access the disk as if it was the c: drive. I figured this would convince DM that it was accessing a hard drive, since c:\ftl is where the game was originally anyways, but it just asks me to insert the master disk in the the c: drive now...

(FYI, the hard drive on the machine in question is formatted as FAT32, which the disk I'm booting can't read... so there's no worries about hard drive conflicts when I subst something into c:)

I guess the executable makes some goofy hardware check to make sure you're not using a hard drive... seems odd that it would do this though.

--Zero