Executive Suite Game Issue

[CrashOverride]

I'm having a problem getting the Executive Suite game to run on my XT. I put the game.dat and esuite.com files in a directory on my hard drive and when I run esuite.com, it does nothing and just returns to the C> prompt. I see that it works on the PCjs website. I noticed that it is setup to boot to a DOS 2 disk, then switches to a B drive to run the application. I then tried the same thing, and the same problem happens. Does anyone know if there are some parameters I need to configure for the game to work?

Crazy thing is, I can just take the two files and run in DosBox, and it works. Just won't work on real hardware! I'm running 3.30, and I even tried booting from 5.02, same issue.

 

[Plasma]

I'm not familiar with that game, but according to Mobygames it's a PC booter. Do you have the disk image?

 

[Plasma]

After some inspection, it looks like game.dat is the original 160K disk image and esuite.com is some kind of hacked loader for DOS. I would try writing game.dat to a floppy disk with DskImage and then booting from the floppy.

Writing to drive A:

format a: /1 /n:8 /t:40
dskimage game.dat 0:40:1:8

Writing to drive B:

format b: /1 /n:8 /t:40
dskimage game.dat 1:40:1:8

 

[CrashOverride]

It almost worked. I was able to successfully image it, according to the software, but the disk wouldn't boot. Just for fun, I tried using dskimage to create an image from the floppy it created and copied the image to my Gotek, and during the process it gave me 3 unrecoverable crc errors. I tried booting from the image and I just get a blinking cursor, just like the floppy.

I wonder if it is my disks that are the problem. I have some single sided single density soft sectored disks, but perhaps my drive doesn't like them. I am able to read\write other disks, but I don't really use actual physical media much anyone, and this is one of the reasons why. Just fine back in the 80's, but 40 years later? Not so much.

Does anyone out there have an image file of the original disk? I didn't see one online...

 

[hargle]

If inside esuite.com you see a message that says:
"Dos driver by Mok"
You've bumped into yet another loader by Mok that doesn't work on the original CPU the game was designed for.
The loader uses 286+ CPU instructions and won't run on an 8088. Doh.
A few of Mok's loaders have been reworked to be 8088 compatible, but it doesn't yet appear that that one has gotten the treatment.

 

[Plasma]

Looks like this is the case.

 

[hargle]

This one didn't look too bad. I only found two violations of 8088 instructions and was able to patch mok's loader.
Here's a drop in replacement for ESUITE.COM
Disclaimer: I am away from my 8088 machines and only have DOSBox available which doesn't have (to my knowledge) true 8088 emulation so I am unable to give this a proper testing before release. If it doesn't work for you, I'll give it a go again next week when I'm back with my 5150.

 

[hargle]

Nope. Doesn't work.
I tried this version on my mono 5150, my PCjr and my 486. On both the 8088 class machines, it does get through the loader portion but hangs not long after that. On my 486 I received a Divide by Zero error.
After poking around a bit more I see that INT 13h is redirected into the DOS driver, and I did not check to see if there are 286+ instructions going on in the INT 13h handler- this would explain why it gets through the loader but then crashes when the game tries to do anything more with the disk drive.
I also can't rule out any modifications done to GAME.DAT itself- I haven't looked in there.

I did however find an original(?) dump in teledisk form that works on all 3 of my machines. The only thing that didn't work is attempting to restore a game at start- I hope this is because there was nothing to restore meaning the game image is pristine.

So use this booter image until another DOS conversion can be whipped up.