Bumble Games (1983) - locks dosbox up \ VOGONS

Bumble Games (1983) - locks dosbox up

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First post, by exofreeze

Posted on 2012-08-14, 16:39

exofreeze Offline

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I have found an older title called Bumble Games which was written in basic and was part of IBM's early learning series.

The game is packed with basica and a bat file which calls:
BASICA hello.bas/f:0/s:0

This causes dosbox to lock up and require a forced task kill however.

I am using 0.74.

In the debugger I noticed that it claimed disk 0 was not active. ripsaw8080 has pointed out with other games that have this message that mounting an arbitrary img file as the A drive works in some cases. In this case, it does bypass the disk 0 not active error, however in the debugger it shows it repeatedly trying to write a 1 and a 0 to the same address until it locks up.

Reply 1 of 4, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 2012-08-14, 16:55

ripsaw8080 Offline

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Try a different BASIC interpreter than the one that is included, such as GWBASIC or BASICA for a PC clone (e.g. Compaq). The BASIC interpreters published by IBM tend to rely on BASIC in ROM, which clone PCs (and DOSBox) don't have.

Reply 2 of 4, by exofreeze

Posted on 2012-08-14, 17:09

exofreeze Offline

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Both gwbasic and basica allow the game to start, however they both get a line buffer overflow.

Watching the debug it appears to be when the menu.bas is called.

Reply 3 of 4, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 2012-08-14, 17:36

ripsaw8080 Offline

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That means the .BAS file being loaded into the interpreter has a line that is too long. I suspect the file is either corrupt or has been modified from its original form, possibly to convert it to other BASIC dialects (e.g. QBasic). Check the date stamps on the .BAS and make sure they all have a 1983-ish date.

Reply 4 of 4, by exofreeze

Posted on 2012-08-14, 17:50

exofreeze Offline

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It appears the files have been converted using basic2qb.

I suppose there is no way to convert them back?

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