King_Duke and bjwil1991, thank you so much for testing!

K1n9_Duk3 wrote:

- You really should do something to clear the BIOS keyboard buffer when the game quits. I made the mistake of running the game from DosZip on the Pentium MMX and couldn't quit the game because all the times I hit enter when the game started were still in the input queue after quitting and were now processed by DosZip, so the program keept restarting every time I quit.

Yes, this is a FreeBasic gfxlib (gfxlib has the keyboard handler) issue that presents itself on some systems but not on others. I am looking into ways to fix it.

K1n9_Duk3 wrote:

- Your game drastically increases sound and music volume at startup. My ears still hurt from the first time I ran it on actual hardware. It would be nice to have an option to customize the volume via config files.

Indeed. This was for DOSBox - without it, everything was far too quiet. I am in the process of implementing a menu, which will include volume controls. Also your next issue about turning off the OPL volume, same code that will be fixed.

K1n9_Duk3 wrote:

- The fact that the first bit of the sound effect is played and playback stops after that suggests that your game is using an incorrect IRQ setting (assuming it uses the IRQ and doesn't send the samples directly).

Ah, I will look into this. The sound effects code is extremely alpha at this point because I basically copy-pasted it from some example code somewhere, and have yet to actually figure out what it's doing step by step. I will probably rewrite or heavily modify the SB detection code.

(also I will include the ability to turn off sound and/or music so people with non-SB-compatible cards aren't up the creek with no paddle)

bjwil1991 wrote:

IBM ThinkPad 380D (Pentium 150, 48MB RAM, Crystal CS4236B, DSTN 12.1" 800x600, 1.35GB HDD, 3.5" 1.44 FDD, CD-ROM, Windows 95B converted from FAT16 to FAT32), and the game does load after I set the BLASTER parameter in the autoexec.bat file. The game loads without issues, but, after playing for about a minute or so, the game locks up, but, I can press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart the computer without issues. This was in Windows 95B DOS Mode.

Interesting. I have not had the issue with soft-locking up after a certain period of time. Maybe I have a memory leak or some sloppy loop code somewhere. Also I bet the game looks pretty shadowy on that DSTN screen =)

Ultimately this thing is very unstable. My gut tells me it has mostly to do with the FreeBasic gfxlib. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is really written and tested fully only in DOSBox.