Mistery House Take Over for Windows x64?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hi guys,

Is there a way to run the kit for Mistery House under Windows x64? I asked one of the authors but he said it was too old.

I mean, how to be able to compile the images using the kit…

http://archive.turbulence.org/Works/mystery/

Thank you,

2

First thing I’d try is XP mode.

But, this is pretty old code. I’m sure any tweaks you do to that source will compile with the bundled Inform compiler… but… I’m not sure it’s worth it. Whatever you want to do, it might be easiest just to look at the code for reference, get the images, and re-implement in the latest I7.

My two cents.

3

The problem here is that the package includes “blc.exe”, which is compiled as a 16-bit MS-DOS executable, which can’t be run on a 64-bit Windows system. (The other executable, “inform.exe”, is a Windows console application, so is fine.) There are several ways round this, but none is entirely trivial:

  • Recompile “blc.exe” as a Windows console application. The source code is on the Archive (http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXblorb.html) as “iblorbs.zip” and it shouldn’t be too hard to recompile it, if you know what you’re doing.
  • Use the Mac/Linux provided Blorbing tool, which is a Perl script (“reblorb.pl”). Doing this might require some knowledge of Python.
  • Set up VirtualPC with a 32-bit Windows image and run it all there. The “XP Mode” that Peter refers to is a form of this, with some changes to make it harder to spot that virtualized programs are running under VirtualPC.

I would suggest that the first of these is probably the easiest, at least if you’re able to run a C compiler.

4

If it’s actually a DOS executable, would it run under DOSBox?