VOGONS


First post, by MrFlibble

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Oldbie

Block-o-Mania is a formerly shareware Soko-Ban style game you can find at the author's website (under the tab Abandoned Games):
http://crystalshard.net/?p=8#

The game, originally released in 1989, comes in three flavours, with separate binary executables for VGA, EGA and CGA modes.

The VGA version, which is the default one, crashes on level 6. The EGA version works fine. I've not tested this outside DOSBox so I can't tell how it works on real hardware, but I'd be grateful if someone could look into this to check if it's a DOSBox issue.

What I've tried, unsuccessfully, was reduce the amount of CPU cycles, start the game with loadfix or loadfix -25, reduce memsize to 4, change machine to vgaonly and cputype to 386_prefetch.

The password for level 6 is ioqjnbvn.

I've looked up the issue, users in other forums also report that level 9 crashes in all video modes, but a user has been able to crack passwords for the first 38 levels or so.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 1 of 2, by ripsaw8080

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Rank DOSBox Author
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The VGA version, BLOCK.EXE, uses some PIC resource files that the other versions do not use. The QUESMARK.PIC and REDHERE.PIC files may be corrupt, as they lack header data that the other PIC files have. Copying PCURSE.PIC to QUESMARK.PIC prevents the abend on level 6 -- I'm sure the graphics are then not drawn as intended, but it supports the corrupt PIC files hypothesis.