[Blindapple] So close to working on the Mac!

Sat Nov 23 01:31:14 EST 2024

Since we can switch disks, you don’t really need the HD image. I know some people added new stuff to the main hall, I think there was one where you could visit a witch and get your stats boosted. But that isn’t in the original at all. The only thing I remember that was graphics was that the Main Hall disk drew a dragon picture. I don’t think that messed with speech at all though, you just had to wait through it. But it did sort of make you wonder if speech was broken sometimes.

> On Nov 22, 2024, at 10:32 PM, Joseph Norton via BlindApple <blindapple at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>>>> 
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>>>> 
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