VOGONS


First post, by grapefruit

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I'm running Robot Odyssey and Rocky's Boots (similar game engine) on dosbox 0.73, running on OSX. In the game, you press the arrow keys to move by large increments, and shift-arrow to move by small increments. However, it doesn't seem to register the shift key, and shift-arrow moves the avatar by large increments. This is maddening because the game seems to work perfectly otherwise, but this little thing renders it unplayable!

I've tried playing around with keyboard setup, even remapping the keys, but all the keys work normally as far as I can tell. At the commandline, I can use shift and all other keys normally.

When I played these games on the original machines, years ago, it worked fine, so I presume the problem must be in emulation; but if dosbox is picking up the keyboard signals accurately, what can the problem be? Does anyone have any ideas?

Reply 2 of 5, by Jorpho

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Another question: can you solder?

I was messing around with a version of the game I found a while ago. While I do not recall the problem you describe, I found that it was impossible to solder as described in the tutorial. Naturally, as I did not have the original disks, I had no way of knowing if this was some kind of bug or just a problem with the version I found.

(You are using original disks, right?)

Reply 3 of 5, by grapefruit

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Yes, I tried both shift keys. I even tried both at once. I tried remapping them and then using them. I tried more things than it even makes sense to try. What I really wish is that I could just customize the movement keys, and then maybe I wouldn't have this problem...

As for soldering, I didn't even get that far. Moving around, opening locks, basically just doing anything beyond the first screen is impossible without fine movement. You can't center yourself on the wires without fine movement.

I'm not using the original disks, but copies on my hard drive. I don't have a floppy drive on this computer.

Reply 4 of 5, by Jorpho

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grapefruit wrote:

I'm not using the original disks, but copies on my hard drive. I don't have a floppy drive on this computer.

Yes, but did you make the copies from the original disks, or did you download them from somewhere? Or at least, are the copies you are using the same copies you used on the original machines?

I'm kind of wondering if there might be some excpetionally devious copy protection scheme at work here, and that you might have to make proper floppy disk images and mount them with IMGMOUNT in order to get the game to work properly in DOSBox.

Two things that come to mind are to turn the cycles all the way down or to change the machine type in the DOSBox.conf to "CGA", but I don't recall that helping with my soldering problem.

(By the way, if all else fails, you might be able to find a copy of the Apple II version that could be used with an emulator, but I don't recall having luck with that either.)

Reply 5 of 5, by robertmo

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grapefruit you need to use arrow keys on your numeric keypad 😀