2020-6-14

Hi-Res-Rats
2020-6-14 18:56

Hi all! I’m having issues with my copy of Aster’s Labyrinth, does anyone else have experience getting this game to run?

A little backstory first, I’ve been lurking a while so I might as well introduce myself. I played a lot of adventure games as a kid, I was too young at first but my older brother was really into them and would sit with me and help read out and explain the options. So as I grew up, I still played them through for nostalgia sake, but got distracted with RuneScape and WOW etc as a teen. I recently fell back in love after watching some speedrunning streams, I was too young of course to think much about the code at the time but now I’m totally amazed by how they were able to do so much with so little, jank aside.

Since I’m just getting into game dev myself, I decided to go back and play some of my favorites. Running dumped code through ScummVM, naturally. Didn’t know much about running virtual machine software at first (still don’t! Hence this post). Been messing around with ScummVM settings and TAS tools to check out what makes them tic and recreate tricks I see in routes, I'm not into getting competitive though. More of a way to inspire my own dev projects.

Anyway, to the point. I dug out my brother’s box of games to relive some memories, and found Aster’s Labyrinth in there. I remember this one fondly, but it seems like online people only know Daedalus for the magazine and store, not their games. They didn’t have very many, obviously their other projects did a lot better. I wonder if they were dissapointed? I added it to my list to try out but it looks like no one’s dumped the code yet??? Maybe I just couldn’t find it.

I ordered a floppy drive and with some messing around, my other games seem to work fine, some bugs and last minute fixes seems pretty standard lol. With Aster though, it absolutely chugs no matter what I do. It's got as much storage as I can give it, it's on low-res graphics and all the correct settings from what I can tell. Seems that most of these games have taken hot fixes to run even in virtual machine, maybe a lot more work is needed beyond my current skills.

I don’t remember it running this slow back then, help??? Do I need to go look for a working Apple II (pandemic project, anyone?)