Even though I'm a big adventure game lover, I hadn't known of AdvJam before. The jam is about creating an adventure game in a mere 14 days. This year, it ran from 4 to 18 May and I learned about it in time and was able to create an entry for it. "Spy Quest 1 - Mission: SPECTRUM" is my tribute to the older text parser adventure games as made in the 1980s by Sierra. Not actual Sierra AGI, but with the same kind of blocky low-res style of artwork in all the 16 glorious EGA colours. Party like it's 1988!
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Blog posts tagged "freeware" – Posts 6..10 of 11 posts found:
And then Windows 10 Creators Update came out. Along with all kinds of improvements came the reset of all customisation to default settings (ugh!). This included resetting the MIDI output to Microsoft's default and underwhelming "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth". I found my MIDI Selector tool was no longer completely effective on Windows 10 x64 and had a minor bug as well as some slight inefficiencies. Fixed version 1.0.1 has been posted on the tools page.
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Windows Vista and later no longer include the MIDI mapper that was used in earlier Windows versions to route MIDI output to the preferred device. Vista did away with this, supporting only the rather underwhelming "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth". While this is adequate for most users, it simply won't do if you have a proper MIDI synth for retro gaming or for playing MIDI files through Media Player. There exist several tools on the net that can change the default MIDI output device, but it appears there are differences in registry keys used between Windows Vista and Windows 7. The tool for one simply won't work on the other, so unless you knew which one to use, you'd still be stuck with Microsoft's softsynth.
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This is an update to the RunExit tool I created a few years ago for Windows 3. The original tool just plain ran the program and waited for it to complete. It didn't set the working directory for the program it ran (which messed up some programs, such as the games from Microsoft's Best of Entertainment pack) and didn't pass parameters, which may limit the usefulness in some other cases.
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A user at the VOGONS forums posted a question about being able to start Windows 3.1 (inside DOSBox) with another application and shutting down that Windows instance (and thus DOSBox) immediately when that application exits. This would normally be accomplished by setting the application as the shell in place of the default (Program Manager) by changing the shell=progman.exe line in SYSTEM.INI to the path of the application's executable.
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