Gopherman wrote on 2020-10-19, 18:18:

It installed just fine, and I was able to play it once, but now every time I put the floppy in the drive and run the exe, DOS gives me an error message saying "cannot load file ascii.dat"

This is unclear. How exactly did you install the game? Why do you need to put "the floppy in the drive" every time you need to run the game? Please try to be as precise as possible.

I installed the game by running install.bat from disk 1 and then inserting disk 2 when prompted. And I need to put the floppy (by that I mean disk 1) in the drive every time I play the game because if I try to run drwho.exe from my hard drive without the disk in the floppy drive, I get a message that says "Please insert DR WHO disk 1."

I had a quick look at the version on the Internet Archive and was unable to reproduce that problem, but it is possible the version there is different from yours - especially as it has an install.exe and not an install.bat.

Can you provide the contents of install.bat ? It may yield some clues.

How would I go about doing that? I'm very new to working with DOS so I don't really know all its ins and outs yet.

When you would normally use install.bat, use the command "type install.bat" instead. (Hopefully it won't be too long to transcribe. Or you can take a picture of the screen.)

@echo off
@echo.
@echo Dalek Attack installation program
@echo
IF "%1" == "" goto :error
cd %1\
md %1drwho
copy inst2.bat %1drwho
%drwho\inst2.bat %1
goto :end
:error
@echo ERROR: Destination disk not specified
@echo USAGE: INSTALL x:
@echo (Where x: is the name of your hard drive, usually C: or D:)
:end

So when you ran "install.bat", does that mean you typed "install c:" ?

Do you have a directory named "drwho" on your hard drive? When you run the game, are you typing C:\DRWHO\DRWHO or are you typing "cd drwho" and then "drwho" ?

This is what I meant by "please try to be as precise as possible".

Sorry, yes, I did type "install c:" and yes I am typing C:\DRWHO\DRWHO to run the game.

Hmm try cd to the game directory. Likely the game needs the working directory to be the same as the game

Yes, precisely. You need to run the game by typing

1cd drwho
2drwho

When you type C:\DRWHO\DRWHO , then drwho.exe will try to find ascii.dat (and all its other files) in C:\ , which will not work. Using the above commands will probably stop the game from trying to ask for its floppy disk as well.

That worked! Thanks for your help, both of you!