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I tried to enter my ZZT game this year in the TSA competition [not the airport guys- read my other post] and the game wouldn't run from the CD. It would just say "DOS Error" and make a red screen. Is there any way you know of to run ZZT from a read-only place?

I've never encountered that. Maybe changing the extension to .sav and trying to (R)estore it from the title screen might be a work around.

I was able to reproduce this by putting DOSBox and ZZT on a read-only disk image; loading games and restoring saved games both failed to work.

I then tried setting just TOWN.ZZT and SAVED.SAV to read-only; all the other games ran just fine, but I couldn't play Town or restore my saved game. So it looks like ZZT needs write access (even if it doesn't use it, which is weird).


Idea 1: I don't know if this exists, but DOSBox might have an option for simulating a writeable filesystem. You can't be the only one who's wanted to run a game from a CD.

Idea 2: I bet someone's already written a TSR that fools DOS programs into thinking they have full disk access. If not, I bet it's not that hard to write one.

When I first got ZZT and Super ZZT they were on a shareware CD and I ran them right off the cd. You obviously can't save, but it definitely was possible in Windows 95.

Dr. Dos wrote:When I first got ZZT and Super ZZT they were on a shareware CD and I ran them right off the cd. You obviously can't save, but it definitely was possible in Windows 95.

quoting to confirm, because this was also my very first exposure to zzt

monster zoo was the best...

Dr. Dos wrote:When I first got ZZT and Super ZZT they were on a shareware CD and I ran them right off the cd. You obviously can't save, but it definitely was possible in Windows 95.

I was able to run Best of ZZT from a shareware CD on my old (ancient?) 486.

I can prepare a CD booting ZZT for you tomorrow in a few hours.

Zenith Nadir wrote:this was also my very first exposure to zzt

monster zoo was the best...

seconded

hey where's the story about moose playing super zzt at day care so he wouldn't spend nap time playing with himself on ircman

[I know, I know, this post is really old, sorry!] Anyways, if you do know what's causing this, or how to fix it, please help me! The next competition is coming in February, and the only reason I won last year is because no one else entered. If someone else enters, and my game doesn't work, I'm screwed. I was thinking about throwing it into a QEMU box, but I thought that might be too complicated.

Oh, and you guys seem to be lucky- I first played it off a 720k floppy! Came in a big Epic Megagames pack my friend across the street got in the mail.

Would this be a bad time to point out that basically every computer in the universe tends to possess USB ports? Or is that somehow disallowed by paranoid judges?

Already tried that. Only cd's are accepted, but yes, all of the computers have usb ports. They also made it clear that the program is not to touch the hard drive in any way.

From what I have learned about your school... there wouldn't be a computer old enough to have a 3 1/2 floppy disk maybe?

Ridiculous solution number 2: Run an Ubuntu LiveCD, sudo aptitude install dosbox, edit the config file to turn everything to max, run ZZT off of the RAM by quickly downloading it from a dropbox or something. Doesn't come close to touching the hard drive and avoids the usage of a USB disk. Or tell them to quite being whiny jackasses and accept that some things don't work the way they want them to and that's just life, dammit.

You know what? Scratch that. I don't need you being burned for a witch or something.