Rocks'n'Diamonds

I have rocksndiamonds on a dos machine and when I try running rocks.exe I get a black screen and have to reboot. After reboot I read stderr.txt and it says something about ./userdata/setup.cnf not being found. What can i do to fix this?

> I have rocksndiamonds on a dos machine and when I try running rocks.exe I get a black screen
> and have to reboot.

Hmm, which kind of DOS is this? For example, are you using
- plain MS-DOS (version?)
- other DOS versions like DR-DOS or FreeDOS
- the DOS that can be started from Windows 98 etc.

How much free/total memory do you have? The free amount of "DOS memory" (the memory under 640KB) should not matter that much, as the game uses a DOS extender, but you will need some MB to run the game.

Please describe your hardware and system a bit, as this has some impact on how the game runs on such an old DOS box.

> After reboot I read stderr.txt and it says something about ./userdata/setup.cnf not being
> found. What can i do to fix this?

That should not be the problem (the setup config file was initially not found; this should only produce a warning).

As I create the DOS version of Rocks'n'Diamonds by cross-compiling on a Linux box, I do not test every version (especially the last releases) under a "real" DOS. Please check if older versions of R'n'D run on your system, as they are better tested and require less resources; you can get older DOS versions of R'n'D here:

http://www.artsoft.org/RELEASES/msdos/rocksndiamonds/

If any old versions runs on your system, please tell me which is the newest versions that works.

I am using DRDOS with 639k conventional memory, 65472k extended

There are sometimes memory problems which make me have to reboot but other games like Doom, abuse, xenon2 work with it.

I've tried versions
3.1.0,
3.0.8,
2.1.1, and
1.4.0
all of them do the same thing.

> I am using DRDOS with 639k conventional memory, 65472k extended

Well, that should indeed be enough RAM. :-)

Hmm, no idea why it does not work. I thought that the included memory extender could have a problem with DR-DOS, but then it should abort at an earlier stage (and don't write a warning about setup.cnf, which means that it was already in the process of loading things).

At least versions 1.4.0 and 2.1.1 were definitely tested successfully under real (MS-)DOS...

Do you have the chance to boot from an MS-DOS floppy and then start R'n'D (from the harddisk)? Maybe there's some sort of problem with DR-DOS. (I only had a report from someone who ran it under FreeDOS, which worked.)

It could also be the graphics or sound hardware; as far as I know, the (relatively old) version of the Allegro game library I use for R'n'D does not support all graphics and sound cards (maybe especially newer ones).

Booting msdos and playing works. Thanks

Also thanks a lot for this report -- now I know that there are problems with DR-DOS (and I think now that it might indeed be the included memory extender that causes the problem when run in conjunction with DR-DOS).

I probably won't fix this problem, as the DOS version is only rarely used these days, but if you like, you can send me a little mail (to "info@artsoft.org"), so I can contact you if I should have found a different memory extender (or another solution) which you might want to test then.

Again, thanks for this compatibility report.