Old DOS game CD

[Japo]

Hi, 1st post, I'm not confident I can get a solution to this, but if I did it would probably be here.

 

There's this game for DOS, Daggerfall (The Elder Scrolls II). Its producers released it some time ago for free, as a publicity move for one of its sequels (The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion). They released it as a crummy ZIP with the contents of the CD (not a image just files in a folder), and provided instructions on how to play it with DOSBox, an emulator that can run DOS programs in modern OSes.

 

This emulator has a way of accessing disks, that you have to mount a real folder in your PC or a disk image as a virtual disk inside DOSBox. The instructions provided were to mount the folder with the contents of the CD, and the only special emulation options were letting DOSBox know that this was to be a CD (MSCDEX and whatnot), and that the disk should have the label "Daggerfall". So it seems the only check the game makes on the CD is to look at the label.

 

But mind you, the label passed to DOSBox to mount the virtual disk had to be "Daggerfall", neither "daggerfall" nor "DAGGERFALL" would work! I know this makes little sense, since DOS was case-insensitive, and disk labels were always displayed all-caps. So I can't see how this can be the fault of either the game or DOSBox alone, it has to be some coincidental undefined behavior of both?

 

I haven't asked my question yet, but the previous paragraph is the only hint I have to look for an answer. The problem is that I would like to make an ISO of this last official release of the game. But when I make one out of those files and tell ImgBurn to set the label, and mount this image in DOSBox instead of the folder, then the game won't run complaining that I have the wrong CD. I mount the folder as CD instead (with the correct spelling of the label) and it works.

 

I've tried lots of combinations among the millions of options ImgBurn has. I can only hope there's one that would make an ISO that would work with this.

 

(Just to be clear, because I'm sure this is the first thing you'd ask me, no I wasn't putting in a subfolder of the root what should be in the root; the paths were correct.)

[LIGHTNING UK!]

Use the ISO9660 file system and click the 1999 button in the Restrictions -> ISO9660 tab.

 

When you've done that, enter the volume label with the correct case and burn.

[Japo]

Many thanks for answering. That didn't work either, just tried again (after first clicking on reset settings). I had also tried with 1988 since the game is from 1996, then it doesn't work, and besides ImgBurn displays a warning that some files had to be altered, but I think those are non evident changes because I'm almost certain there are no files with names longer than 8.3 (every file even keeps their attributes with last modified date of 1996) and I couldn't detect any changes afterwards in a cursory look.

 

Also in ISO9660 the label has no case, has it? ImgBurn converts anything I enter into all-caps.

 

However there are news. While I was waiting for a reply I stopped playing with ImgBurn and looked harder at the game itself. It turns out the exe that you're told to use to start the game, is a very small one that runs some checks and either displays one of several error messages and quits, or calls a second exe. If I call that second exe directly instead, the game works fine, with an image made with the default ImgBurn settings (ISO+UDF).

 

So there's a workaround, although there's still curiosity. But I'll go to bed now...

 

Thanks a lot again, if you can think of something else I'll still be interested in trying it.

Edited January 25, 2011 by Japo