Old DOS game suddenly won't run right.

[bizzybody]

My mother loves this ancient 1992 DOS Klondike game by Eduardo Martins. It uses medium resolution EGA video mode and until recently it ran fine on her laptop with XP Home. Yup, that's the whole game in that 116K zip file. I originally got it on a 360K shareware floppy.

Suddenly it won't run properly. When launched it opens a DOS window then minimizes to the taskbar. Click the button on the taskbar and it expands then immediately minimizes again.

It's supposed to run full screen. The shortcut properties are set to run full screen, all the shortcut settings are the same as on another XP system where the old game still runs like it should.

Edited October 8, 2009 by Tripredacus

[Tripredacus]

After doing some research, I was able to determine that there was indeed a shareware and full version of this game. Also unable to determine if this is abandonware or not, so to be safe, I removed your attachment. Info on the creator (including contact info) is located here:

http://www.textfiles.com/computers/asp3404.txt

Back to the task at hand, you may want to try out a DOS emulator, such as DOSBox.

[bizzybody]

I found that something changed the config.nt file in windows\system32 so I copied the backup from windows\repair That worked for a while to make the old game run, but something chaned config.nt again. So I copied the backup again and this time checked the read only attribute.

Full scans with up to date Avast and Spybot Search and Destroy come up clean.

That was the shareware version I attached. I never paid for the full version. I assume part of the $5 the disk cost me off a spinner rack went to him. There's no nagging or other reminders, dunno what, if anything extra the "full" version was supposed to have.

*reads the Klondike DOC file for the first time ever in 17 years* Hmm, Mr. Martins also wrote a Poker Solitaire and Pyramid solitaire game, also in "high-resolution EGA graphics" and "They can be found wherever you bought Klondike." Not likely, considering the drugstore where I got the Klondike disc isn't there anymore.

Oh look, it has commandline options for computers without a mouse. The stuff one can discover from those instruction thingies...

Edit: HOTU has his Poker Solitaire game tagged as freeware. http://hotud.org/component/content/article/37-strategy/22980

Edited October 9, 2009 by Tripredacus
moved to the gaming forum