NEW EDIT: It turns out that DosBox does not work with screenreaders so this thread may only be of interest to those who are not visually impaired. It contains a link to itch. io (Here) where you can play Eamon Deluxe 5.0.
Hi, very much inspired by B.J. Best’s"LAKE Adventure" I realized that DosBox now works very well in a browser with save files so I decided to put the full Eamon Deluxe 5 online for browser play which I don’t think anyone has done yet. I did not make any of these games, just think Eamon Deluxe deserves more attention. All games can be distributed freely.
Note it is a module based text rpg so you have several adventures to choose from. Most have lots of randomized combat, though some also have a lot of puzzles.
The game starts up in VI mode for visually impaired but I would like to know if it is playable online for visually impaired? Edit: Turns out it isn’t.
EDIT: Problems using the Safari browser have been reported.
I’ve just taken a look at this with Voiceover/Mac OS and unfortunately I wasn’t able to get too far; I got a “press any key to continue” prompt, and then a blank page which only gave me the option to exit full screen mode after I hit the space bar. I’ll play around with this some more to see if I can figure things out.
Thanks for reporting. I am using the same emulator as LAKE Adventure so I would expect them to work the same until the game is running.
According to IFDB, the limitations of LAKE Adventure are: “In-browser DOS emulator. This will take a few moments to load.” AND “…It requires Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Opera. (Safari is not supported.)”
Oops, guess I should have taken a look at Lake Adventure first–I’ve never played it so had no idea it wouldn’t run in Safari. Will try in Chrome instead :).
Results from my Google Chrome test: the web frame where I think the game is supposed to display now contains an unlabeled image in addition to the “press any key” prompt. I hit the space bar and waited for a minute as suggested, but aside from the web frame disappearing, nothing much seemed to happen. Is there perhaps something else I need to do before I try to start the program?
I did manage to get A Runcible Cargo running in Edge so it definitely works. The “press any key” thing took a bit of fiddling though. I think maybe I pressed the Enter key? It doesn’t seem to respond to just any old key for whatever reason.
OK, either there really is some setting I’ve missed or the DOS emulator just doesn’t want to work with Voiceover. I tried pressing enter at the prompt and absolutely nothing happened. Since Lake Adventure was the original inspiration for this project, I fired that up to see if I could get an idea of how things were supposed to work. This time the emulator did appear to launch, but unfortunately it would only give me an empty webpage with no interactive elements.
At least on Windows it seems that we have to click the embedded game window an extra time after clicking the red button “Run Eamon Deluxe 5 VI Mode”, otherwise the key press goes to the surrounding window rather than the embedded window where the game is running. I just changed the game to start up in the full browser window but that probably won’t help(?)…
AFAIK DOS box is completely inaccessible to screenreaders: it just draws to a canvas so it’s not actually text, it’s just an image. I looked at Lake Adventure and that’s true there: I don’t see any accessibility properties. And I found a couple threads on people trying to set up DOS screenreaders inside the emulator but it looked like it was hard to set up and maybe not much success? Or maybe with some emulators but not DOS box?
Thanks Josh. Sorry to waste people’s time. I thought it would work with screenreaders as Eamon Deluxe 5.0 was distributed with dosbox and had VI mode. But for those not in need of a screenreader, I hope you will enjoy it
Oh, that’s too bad :(. I think this is a pretty common accessibility snag with emulators in general right now, which unfortunately puts a lot of retro text adventures out of reach for visually-impaired players.
Yeah, and it shouldn’t be impossible: especially for DOS text-mode games like Lake Adventure: you literally draw the text by putting characters in specific buffer in memory that has one location for each character on screen, so it feels like it should be possible to have the emulator monitor it and figure out which ones change (and which changes represent scrolling), though there are some potential snags there, like some drawing libraries update only the characters that actually change (so if the score went up by one they might change only the last digit). But it feels like you could get close pretty easily, especially with some techniques like “report the whole surrounding word when there’s a change.” Generally not on the radar of people making retro tools, though, I think.
I’ve thought about this too, but I can find any discussion of it with regard to DOSBox or similar emulators. I suppose a first step would be to make it a feature request for one of the active DOSBox forks such as DOSBox Staging.
A brief update: I spent some time bugfixing and removing four of the 177 games. These four were never put in the public domain but published in 1996 or earlier. Thanks to Eamon Wiki for informing the public. The four removed games are:
More over, I opened up several games which were locked by default as they did not include VI-mode but as the online version is inaccessible to screenreaders anyway, I might as well open them.
So there are now included 173 games - all in the public domain. You might have to delete the save-files within your browser to activate all 173 games. Also, I cannot promise there won’t be changes going forward but I hope not. Enjoy PS: I still hope an online emulator will allow for screenreaders. If this becomes possible at some point, please let me know.
I can very much recommend A Runcible Cargo with a decent new to medium character.