(continuing the bug discussion of MAD WARRIOR; perhaps this should be split)
I investigated this when it was first mentioned (ISTR seeing a screenshot but I can’t find it now), despite not currently having access to any version of Windows, because it sounded so much like a lack of ANSI.SYS from the DOS days.
It’s obviously not that, but further investigation suggests it may be possible to make this game work as intended on Windows 10. (Obviously I haven’t tested any of this.)
It turns out that the ability for the Windows console to interpret ANSI/VT100/ECMA-48 escape sequences was added sometime in the Windows 10 era (I guess when ConPTY came in), but it started out off by default. See Console Virtual Terminal Sequences on Microsoft’s website.
I infer that this feature may later have been turned on by default, and perhaps the developer of MAD WARRIOR relies on this default?
Originally, the idea was that the developer would call SetConsoleMode(handle, ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING) to opt-in to escape sequence processing. Presumably MAD_WARRIOR.EXE doesn’t do this (I haven’t checked). Obviously there’s not a lot a player can do about this. (If the author is reading, perhaps they are able to update the game for this.)
However! I’ve found stuff that suggests there’s a registry setting to change the default. This answer talks about a VirtualTerminalLevel key.
That is a thing a player could try (at your own risk, obviously). You probably want to change it back afterward.
(You may also have to turn off a setting called “Use Legacy Console” for this to make a difference, if I’m reading this correctly. Or, I suppose it’s possible that MAD_WARRIOR.EXE is doing everything right and this was the problem on Mike’s computer all along?)