Return to Zork

[MysteryScience]

Hello, has anyone tried this game?

in my case it freezes after passing the second screen (specifically when you try to enter the lighthouse)

Thanks!

update: if you turn off the music before entering the lighthouse area, the game continues without problems.

[Malor]

I tried running it and wasn't able to even get to the point of controlling anything. It just froze up during the intro.

[MysteryScience]

I'm using the Windows 98SE VHD for the MiSTer AO486 core (you can search for this vhd in the archive.org)

Selected the EMM386 option

And the sound settings in the game are SoundBlaster Pro 16 and the music MT-32 (I have the MT-32pi hat)

[thedracle]

It seems no matter what, if music is enabled, the game will crash at various points when the music track transitions.

MT-32 doesn't help. I haven't been able to figure out any workaround unfortunately.

[Bas]

Intriguing! Will try to get this one to live.

[Bas]

Direct link to my build based on MS-DOS 6.22:

https://code.area536.com/DOSContainers/ ... rtzork.zip

It's a bootable VHD that runs on AO486 with SoundBlaster preconfigured and I just managed to get inside the lighthouse. I don't know this game at all so have a go, see if it works for you. If it does I'll fit it with a boot menu so sound hardware can be chosen at startup.

If you're interested, here's the rest of the repo with more VHD's:

https://code.area536.com/DOSContainers/games

[thera34]

I assume OP referred to CD version not working properly when music is on, am I mistaken ?
@Bas: Didn't check much into your VHD (just ran it 5 mins and checked diff between your install and my CD based one), but it looks to me that is the floppy version, right ?

[Bas]

This is the floppy version, yes. I'll see what I can do for CD. If it's CD audio tracks, then that's mostly up to the core and its support for that as well as the integrity of the CD dump.

[Bas]

I packaged a CD-ROM version that seems to be working, as in: I can wander around, get into the lighthouse, see a few videos and get killed by a rather disturbingly large bird..

ftp://ftp.area536.com/doscontainer/test ... ork-cd.zip

It contains both a VHD and an ISO that need to be mounted at the same time. It may help to set your core RAM to 16MB.

There's an error about EMS and the build is generally messy but it should function. Let me know if it does and I'll clean it up and get rid of the annoying error.

[NML32]

I packaged a CD-ROM version that seems to be working, as in: I can wander around, get into the lighthouse, see a few videos and get killed by a rather disturbingly large bird..

ftp://ftp.area536.com/doscontainer/test ... ork-cd.zip

It contains both a VHD and an ISO that need to be mounted at the same time. It may help to set your core RAM to 16MB.

There's an error about EMS and the build is generally messy but it should function. Let me know if it does and I'll clean it up and get rid of the annoying error.

Could you add imgset.exe to the VHD to auto-mount the CD image?

C:\Drivers\imgset IDE10 CD/rzork/rtzork.iso
cd C:\RTZ-CD
RTZ

Link to imgset
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_M ... leases/drv

[Bas]

Good one, will do!

[thera34]

I packaged a CD-ROM version that seems to be working, as in: I can wander around, get into the lighthouse, see a few videos and get killed by a rather disturbingly large bird..

ftp://ftp.area536.com/doscontainer/test ... ork-cd.zip

It contains both a VHD and an ISO that need to be mounted at the same time. It may help to set your core RAM to 16MB.

There's an error about EMS and the build is generally messy but it should function. Let me know if it does and I'll clean it up and get rid of the annoying error.

Return to Zork's music is a mix of CD audio tracks and MIDI. In some scenes (like 2nd screen at the lighthouse, hardware store, forests) it uses CD tracks, for the rest of the scenes MIDI.
Your image is lacking them ofc, so for example 2nd scene at the lighthouse (before entering it) has no music, as it was supposed to read the CD track.
You can try the bin/cue versions around, you can perfectly play the tracks in any CD player, but in game when arriving to those areas that use CD tracks, it will freeze.
Btw, there is also a 1.2 RTZ patch, but it won't solve the freezing game issue while using CD audio

[Bas]

The core itself does not support CD-audio according to the AO486 Github README. There is code in there from a commit on the 16th of August of this year, but I'm not sure in how far this has all been wired into the handling of the BIN/CUE format itself to allow MS-DOS to actually handle these mixed mode CD's properly and feed the audio back out. So.. I think a partly silent build like the one I posted is as far as things will go for now. I will clean this one up to get rid of the EMS error and include IMGSET into my VHD build framework.

[AmintaMister]

The core itself does not support CD-audio according to the AO486 Github README. There is code in there from a commit on the 16th of August of this year, but I'm not sure in how far this has all been wired into the handling of the BIN/CUE format itself to allow MS-DOS to actually handle these mixed mode CD's properly and feed the audio back out. So.. I think a partly silent build like the one I posted is as far as things will go for now. I will clean this one up to get rid of the EMS error and include IMGSET into my VHD build framework.

The core supports Cd audio CD/DA.

[thera34]

Most of games with CD Audio work fine now on ao486, except RTZ and Betrayal at Krondor afaik, could be some other (this last one is not recognized at all by the core, or at least the bin/cue floating around, but seems to work in PCEm).

[Bas]

Hmm.. if I'm not mistaken that means that either the core is not 100% compatible with mixed-mode CD's just yet, and/or the CUE/BIN's of the games you named are not (nor have they probably ever been) 100% up to spec. I can't do anything with Verilog but I could have a go at remastering the CD into a new image for RTZ under the assumption that laying down all new CD structures it might just jar something into a working condition.. or not.. but there's a reason this stuff is a hobby, right?