4DOS

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

This is unofficial and you shouldn't take my word for it, but I have 
information from an undisclosed source that Larry Skutchan, (spelling?) 
doesn't really care what happens with Microtalk products anymore since 
they're long gone out of business anyway.  I didn't get this from him 
and this specifically didn't mention ASAP, but I doubt if anyone would 
complain if a registered version was floating around somewhere.  
Vocal-Eyes is still being sold for $250 but I wouldn't buy it.  
Fortunately I still have it from when my parents bought it for me 
several years ago.

How do you play TADS and Glulx games in DOS?  I had to compile 
interpreters under Linux because the DOS programs worked so poorly.  
Mostly it's a problem with direct screen writes (apparently ASAP handles 
this better than most other screen readers) but it's also a memory 
issue.  TADS has a plain mode but that gives no status line and breaks 
menus.  It would be nice to find interpreters which support sound and no 
graphics.  Also, how did you set up the USB to boot and actually work in 
DOS?  What DOS version are you running?

Nick Stockton wrote:
> jaws for dos can be gotten from the following URL
> http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/jdosfree.exe
> I do not like it ASAP is much better IMO but I guess if you can't buy asap 
> any more then jaws for dos is better than nothing.
> I'm so lucky my mom knew her 5 year old son would one day be a hobbyist in 
> to old computer systems and bought me a copy of ASAP and a litetalk back 
> when they were still being sold in the 90s.
> I have a giant old computer from the 90s in the other room I put a very old 
> USB card in and after some messing around with dos drivers and a win98 boot 
> disc I still have, I now have a entire dos system running off of a cheepo 
> 1-gig USB thumb drive complete with loads of games mainly z-code as they are 
> best played in dos using ASAP.
> You can play them under gnu/Linux using frotz but some times it wants to 
> reread messages it already read so playing using dos frotz with ASAP for me 
> is better.
> ----- Original Message -----