4/17/89
This message was about an older version of Omega for the IBM-PC, 0.75.
Read the comment near the start of COMPILE.DOS with respect to the current
version, 0.80. Note that the 'X' command and the '^o' command, outlined
below, are available on the current version, too.
----- begin original message -----
This is the first new version since July '88, corresponding to the
first general Omega release since then.
You need a full 640K of memory and (almost certainly) a hard disk to play.
The executable itself is too large to fit on one floppy, and during
the course of the game large level files are created. If you don't have
much space on the hard disk, you may also have problems.
I have added the 'X' command which will tell you the state of the
heap (-2 is ok) and how much memory is left. For me this usually
starts out around 75K-80K.
As the game progresses, more and more memory is allocated which
isn't freed, though it is no longer needed. Consequently, you
should probably do the X command once in a while, and save the
game when it starts to get really low.
The screen display may act differently in some places than it does
when running under Unix, but I haven't found any places where
it does something blatently wrong that the unix version doesn't also
do.
The '^P' command (reprint last message) has been moved to '^O'. The
reason has to do with using the printer, and the fact that Omega was
meant to run in cbreak mode and not raw mode, and because Dos isn't
as flexible as Unix.
If you've only got the executable and associated files needed to run
the game, you obviously can't configure Omega as to where to look for
these files. Consequently you've got to have all the files in one
directory and play the game from there. (If you've got the sources,
you can change this.)
Most general bug reports should probably be sent to the maintainer of
Omega - see COMPILE.ALL for information about that. Bugs which seem to
be PC specific should probably be reported to me.
- Nathan Glasser
nathan@brokaw.lcs.mit.edu (internet)
nathan@mit-eddie.uucp (usenet)
Recent bug fixes specific to PC users include:
- The house bug - Entering houses no longer screws up the game.
- The return bug - You can now use the "return" spell as documented.
- Level creation time - The time to create levels is reasonable again.
Other comments:
For those of you who feel lost without them, arrow keys and home and
end may be used in some menus: inventory, options, and selecting the
number of multiple items to drop.
As long as you exit the game normally, all level files will be removed.
The general version of the game performs saving/restoring in a strange way.
Only the town level and the current level of the dungeon you're in (if any)
are saved. I personally don't think this is the right thing to do, but
have not changed this for the PC. Thus it is not a bug when previously
visited levels disappear after saving the game.
Also, there is still no way to set up the options to use every time
you play without "playing yourself." This is obviously another area
in which the game could be slightly improved, but it's not a bug
that it doesn't do this.
The game as a whole has always been fairly buggy, and there are even
still some known bugs in the game which haven't been fixed, though
it's much better than when the game was first introduced. Because of
the overall bugginess, there are still (unknown?) bugs which manfest
themselves on the PC by causing the machine to crash after quitting
the game, forcing you to reboot. I've not seen anything worse than
this in quite a while, but you never know what might still be lurking
in there.
- Nathan Glasser
nathan@brokaw.lcs.mit.edu (internet)
nathan@mit-eddie.uucp (usenet)
