[Blindapple] So close to working on the Mac!

John Isige gwynn at tds.net
Sat Nov 23 01:05:25 EST 2024


Here’s how you switch disks.

1. Run Mame with the talking main hall disk, or any talking disk really.

Mame apple2ee -flop1 eamontlk.dsk

2. When you want to switch, hit scroll lock on Windows, delete on Mac if you have a full keyboard, or fn-delete on Mac if you have one of the smaller ones, I assume without a numpad. This is whatever key you happen to hit before hitting escape to power down the Apple, in other words.

3. Hit f6. The docs on mamedev.org still say left-shift-f7, which is what you hit back when we were running Mess, so if f6 doesn’t work, try that. But at least for me on Mac, it’s f6 now.

4. Hit a character, I use 1.

5. Hit escape. This powers off the emulated Apple, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to.

6. Run mame again with whatever disk you want to switch to, but after that, add -state and the character you hit. For example:

Mame apple2ee -flop1 d3_002.dsk -state 1

The Apple will come up with that disk in the drive. That disk image is “The Minotaur’s Lair. Assuming you survive and want to go back to the main hall, you do the same thing, hit scroll lock/delete/fn-delete, f6, 1, escape. Then:

Mame apple2ee -flop1 eamontlk.dsk -state 1

That would load the main hall and you’d just hit any key or whatever it instructs you to do, e.g. if you go on an adventure from the main hall, you switch disks and hit c for continue.

I know this works, because I did it last night and survived both the Beginner’s Cave and the Minotaur’s Lair, and got back to the Main Hall. Surprised I survived too, my stats weren’t great, 14 16 14 I think. So pretty meh. This can be hit or miss, e..g. adventure 23, “The Temple of Ngurct”, doesn’t seem to talk for some reason I haven’t figured out yet. Text Talker is still running because review works, but typing doesn’t echo and you don’t get feedback from commands, at least I didn’t. But I think most of them should work. It’s funny, because I used to play Temple on my old Apple 2 E, that’s still somewhere back in PA. So I need to see if I can figure out what’s going on at some point.

Anyway, hope that helps, whether you’re switching disks for Eamon or something else altogether.

 On Nov 22, 2024, at 9:39 PM, Tiny Puppy-butchb via BlindApple <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't think I have the adventures on an hd, I do have several 
> floppies, but never figured out an easy way to swap disks.
> 
> Butch Bussen
> WA0VJR
> butchb at fairpoint.net
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Joseph Norton via BlindApple" 
> <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com>
> To: "'Blind Apple Discussions'" <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com>
> Cc: <joseph.norton at gmail.com>
> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2024 9:32 PM
> Subject: Re: [Blindapple] So close to working on the Mac!
> 
> 
> Hi:
> 
> I wish I knew more about what those Eamon adventures on the HD 
> do, they do something with pokes that disables Textalker.
> 
> If I knew more about this, I bet that HD image could be fixed to 
> run with Textalker.
> 
> There's probably a lot of hours of play on that HD--I just don't 
> know enough about how to fix them.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindApple <blindapple-bounces at bluegrasspals.com> On Behalf 
> Of John Isige via BlindApple
> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2024 12:58 PM
> To: Blind Apple Discussions <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com>
> Cc: John Isige <gwynn at tds.net>
> Subject: Re: [Blindapple] So close to working on the Mac!
> 
> Thanks! F6 did the trick BTW.
> 
> Briefly, Eamon was an adventure game system. You had a disk 
> called the Main Hall, that had an adventure, The Beginner’s Cave. 
> Once you got past that, or if you just wanted to skip it, you’d 
> switch disks to another adventure, and your character was written 
> to that disk. When you finished that adventure, you’d put the 
> main hall disk back in, and it would write your character back to 
> it, so you could go on other adventures. But if your character 
> died in that adventure, it was dead, because it was deleted, not 
> written back to the main hall disk. I should say *is* in all of 
> this, since we can still play them thanks to Mame.
> 
> I’ve got almost all of the adventures as DOS 3.3 floppy images, 
> if the link to the Eamon CD is broken, I can put them up 
> somewhere, if anybody’s interested. There is a talking version of 
> the Main hall disk, I forget who did it, so you just boot from 
> that, and when you save state and switch disks, you still have 
> speech, obviously. So if you can get Eamon from somewhere else 
> but don’t have that, I could put that up too. I’m fairly sure you 
> could also boot from any disk with speech, and switch to the main 
> hall and run from there. So. You’ve got options.
> 
> Oh also, while the main thrust is a sort of DND Medieval fantasy 
> thingy, people wrote all kinds of adventures, so I’m pretty sure 
> there’s at least one Western, some SF stuff, things like that. It 
> wasn’t all just DND/MUD kinds of things. I should also add this 
> mostly happened in the eighties, so it either predated, or at 
> least paralleled, the proliferation of MUDs with all of these 
> different themes we have today.
> 
>> On Nov 22, 2024, at 10:53 AM, Darcy Burnard via BlindApple 
>> <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi.  /usr/local/bin is definitely a good place to put the mame 
>> executable.  As for the various support folders, it doesn’t 
>> really matter where you put them. The only thing to be aware of 
>> is that if your goal is to run mame from anywhere, you’re going 
>> to want to put the full path of each folder in your mame.ini 
>> file.
>> Speaking of the mame.ini, you’re going to want to put it in one 
>> of the places that mame expects to find it.  Look in the 
>> mame.ini file for the inipath option, and place your ini files 
>> in one of those directories.
>> If you do all that, then you should be able to get mame to work 
>> from anywhere.
>> Darcy
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 21, 2024, at 8:05 PM, John Isige via BlindApple 
>>> <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks! I didn’t see your other one, no.
>>> 
>>> Where is the easiest place to put Mame, local/bin? Do the 
>>> supporting files just go in that directory? Right now I have 
>>> everything in home, I just downloaded SDL2 and Mame from the 
>>> Web  and opened them. But once I get this working, it would be 
>>> nice to just change directories and do Mame whatever to load 
>>> stuff.
>>> 
>>> I was using shift-f7, so some of those old Mame docs are on 
>>> mamedev.org because that’s where I found it.
>>> 
>>> https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apple_II
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Nov 21, 2024, at 6:36 PM, Darcy Burnard via BlindApple 
>>>> <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hi.  I don’t know if you saw my other message, but I’ve also 
>>>> been working on the Mac stuff.  I ended up just copying the 
>>>> disks and roms folder from Butch’s package.  I symlinked all 
>>>> the various Mame support folders which are in 
>>>> /opt/homebrew/share/mame.   I then used -createconfig to 
>>>> generate new ini files.
>>>> I don’t know much about the Emon stuff, so can’t help you 
>>>> there, but I can answer a few of your questions.
>>>> To make it so mame starts the emulator immediately, you want 
>>>> to look for the skip_gameinfo option in the ini file, and set 
>>>> it to 1.
>>>> To switch disks, the only way I know to do it on the Mac, is 
>>>> to save the state, exit the emulator, and restart with new 
>>>> disks in the drive.  To save state, you want to do an fn 
>>>> delete, then f6, and then a letter or number.  This took me 
>>>> forever to figure out.  In the past, the key you pressed was 
>>>> shift f7, and there’s a lot of out of date Mame docs out 
>>>> there.
>>>> HTH
>>>> Darcy
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Nov 21, 2024, at 3:11 PM, John Isige via BlindApple 
>>>>> <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hi all.
>>>>> 
>>>>> So close!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Based on Butch’s attachment, I copied all of the Mame stuff 
>>>>> that wasn’t programs into my Mame directory, because Windows 
>>>>> files won’t run, of course. Was booting with errors, so I 
>>>>> took everything out of the apple2ee.ini file except the 
>>>>> Apple specific stuff, under the assumption that the default 
>>>>> Mame.ini would cover everything else. The delete key still 
>>>>> wasn’t working to get to the stuff like powering the Apple 
>>>>> off and such. So I deleted Mame.ini and did Mame -cc to 
>>>>> generate a new one.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Now delete followed by escape powers off the machinelike it’s 
>>>>> supposed to. I still can’t switch disks though. I ran Eamon, 
>>>>> played the first adventure, then told it to go on an 
>>>>> adventure. Now I need to switch disks. I did delete, 
>>>>> shift-f7, 1, escape, which supposedly saves the machine 
>>>>> state. It did go back to the terminal. Then I did:
>>>>> 
>>>>> ./mame apple2ee -flop1 ../ae/dos33/d3_023.dsk -state 1
>>>>> 
>>>>> You’re supposed to hit c so I did. Instead of running the 
>>>>> Adventure and talking, it just kept hitting the drive, 
>>>>> metaphorically speaking, no matter what key I hit. So I just 
>>>>> powered it off.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The only other weirdness I can think of involves two things. 
>>>>> First, for some reason, I have to hit a key to start the 
>>>>> emulator. E.g. if I run this, which works:
>>>>> 
>>>>> ./mame apple2ee -flop1 ../ae/dos33/eamontlk.dsk
>>>>> 
>>>>> It brings up the Mame window, and I have to hit space,, (I 
>>>>> assume any key will work but that’s what I hit), then I get 
>>>>> the beep of the emulator booting. Also, even though there’s 
>>>>> a hard disk controller listed in apple2ee.ini, if I do:
>>>>> 
>>>>> ./mame apple2ee -hard1 harddisk.hd
>>>>> 
>>>>> It says -hard1is an unknown option. But if I do:
>>>>> 
>>>>> ./mame apple2ee -sl7 cffa2 -hard1harddisk.hd
>>>>> 
>>>>> Then the hard disk image boots. So, a couple of thoughts.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 1. Anybody have any ideas on switching disks?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 2. Alternatively, Eamon is the only thing I need to switch 
>>>>> for, I think. There is a hard drive image here of at least 
>>>>> some of the adventures
>>>>> 
>>>>> Or there’s the Eamon CD with almost all of the adventures, 
>>>>> but I’m assuming you can’t just put them on an HD image 
>>>>> easily, because they’ll expect floppies being switched.
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://www.eamonag.org/pages/EamonCD%20ships/EamonCDships.htm
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Can somebody smarter than I am either put Text Talker in the 
>>>>> boot program for the HD image, or tell me how to, or suggest 
>>>>> a way to get the adventures from floppies into a hard drive 
>>>>> image? I’ve got a talking Eamon boot disk if that will help, 
>>>>> although the version on the HD image would be pretty 
>>>>> different.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://www.eamonag.org/pages/eamon_misc.htm#EamonFK%20Hard%20Drive%20Image
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> BlindApple mailing list
>>>>> BlindApple at bluegrasspals.com
>>>>> https://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/blindapple
>>>> 
>>>> 
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