DOS Games Discussion

Hello

i want to install an old labyrinth-game:


It comes in an iso of a games-collection from here:
https://archive.org/details/franzis-ver ... dows-games
The screenshot above also comes from this page.

I mounted the iso on my dosbox with windows 3.1.
and i was able to run the main overview exe, where i can choose games to install.

But when i try to install this one, i get the error below.

How to fix?

Alright, I downloaded the game and used winevdm (which allows to execute 16-bit Win applications on modern Windows) to run the installer, but I got the same error message as you. The installer must be borked somehow, I don't know.

Luckily, the game files are simply compressed with LZ compression, which is easily handled by 7-Zip. So I manually extracted LABY.EX_, LABY.HL_ and COMMDLG.DL_ and renamed the extracted files to LABY.EXE, LABY.HLP and COMMDLG.DLL, and ran it with winevdm. As far as I can tell, it works pretty fine:

I'm attaching the installed programme to the post:

Hello
after i followed your unpacking steps, my dosbox said, it is still somehow compressed...

than i downloaded this:
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/releases
but the installer crashes less than a second after the doubleclick on the file-icon.

than i found that you linked an extracted and than zipped version of the labyrinth game.
And this works in my dosbox.

I only find a few little bugs about the function of making images of mazes:
-the list-box for selecting wall-patterns does not show previews, only, the selected blue underlayed item shows a preview.
-when pasted in the old paint tool inside my dosbox, the repeat-block-size of the pattern does not match the maze-block-size.
Looks like the patterns are fitted for 8x8 pixel blocks, but the maze, pasted in the paint-program is made out of 5x5 pixel blocks.
while the pattern horizontally shifts through the too small maze-blocks, it's last three pixel-rows are cut off at the bottom of every maze-block.

I noticed in the images from Mr Flibble also issues with umlaut-characters in the menu bar, maybe the unpacking did not work correctly for those, or it is just a display thing on the PC used to run it?

Rwolf wrote: ↑ I noticed in the images from Mr Flibble also issues with umlaut-characters in the menu bar, maybe the unpacking did not work correctly for those, or it is just a display thing on the PC used to run it?

That's because I have Cyrillic fonts as the default setting, so no umlauts unless I change the system language setting (I guess?). I'm pretty certain that the unpacking worked correctly.

Does any one know, why the output-maze from the game-intern copy-function has only 5 pixel cell-size instead 8?
8 pixel cell-site would fit perfectly to the given wall-patterns and the mazes would look way cleaner (just like made with an extremely simple monochrome tile-set).
It's pretty sure, that an 8 pixel cell was drawn for each of the patterns and than repeated over and over.

Here i made a compillation of all pixel-patterns, the maze-walls can be filled with (skipped pure black, because it looks the same in any size abd without it, the others fit into a nice square).
some are not very clear about where the pathways are.
And here i took a copy of the first graphic and manually converted it to a tile-size of 8 x 8 pixel.
Here the maze looks way clearer, just like created with a simple pixel-art-game-tile-set.

I scaled up both to double edge-length for easier seeing these pixel-patterns (modern pixels are so tiny).

I found out, that modern gimp could not handle a maze, that was copied by the ingame-function, but when I pasted it into the old paint-version in the DosBox and saved that as a .bmp bitmap file, I could work with that in Gimp outside the Dosbox.