Roger Zelazny discussion

Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold's Chronomaster seems to be written by Jane Lindskold based on Roger Zelazny's ideas. I've had the book for years, but never have gotten around to reading it.

Recently, I ran across a copy of the game on Ebay & picked it up for basically shipping charges. It was published in 1995, after Zelazny died. It's based on the DOS4G gaming engine, so is really made to run on DOS, but most will still run on XP, if you tweak the shortcut correctly (Doom, One Must Fall, etc...). Unfortunately, they can have issues & this has more than most. I could get it to run, but it's wasn't right.

My son told me we had a copy of this game back in the day, but it never ran right. I can understand why. It's one of those games that is set up to reduce piracy by requiring the CD be in the drive while playing - a stupid idea. Worse, the installation program doesn't work correctly, failing to copy needed files to the hard drive. I had to manually copy all the files over & then it would run at all.

Still, all is not lost. Thanks to the wonderful folks at Source Forge for DOSBox, a program made just for running old DOS games. It's a quick & easy shell that does a great job of running old DOS games. If you still remember your DOS commands, it's a snap to set up. If you don't, they have a really good set of instructions.

Anyway, I've got it running. DOSBox supports the substitute command, which means if you copy the entire CD into the Chrono subdirectory, you can then subst a drive for it. Then, you can mount it in DOSBox as the CD drive as well, so you don't actually have to have it cluttering up the area.

It seems like a kind of neat game, so far. The Archives, kind of an encyclopedia to help you understand the world(s), is full of joke references. The AI is called Jester & is pretty funny, too. Good artwork, for the time.