The OS Blues

These days it seems to be a fashion to extend operating systems in incompatible and annoying ways. Even recent versions of my beloved Linux system have been affected by this misery. This section tries to cover the worst cases of OS problems you might exptect.

In all cases mentioned here you should refer to section VI of readme.1st (click here to see a slightly HTML-ized version of it). Section VI contains extensive advice which will help you to fix the mentioned problems.

The following problems are known:

General Problems

1. Make sure that you have at least three times as much disk space as your current save game size (at least 6 MB in any case!).
2. Don't switch your screen resolution between games.
3. Do not turn off your computer without quitting ADOM.

DOS

1. Don't run ADOM from drives created with SUBST.
2. Use a DPMI server (or try the one included with your distribution).
3. Don't expect a correct color map when using the PC emulation of the Archimedes PC.
4. Don't use caching utilities from Norton.

Linux

1. Versions since Gamma 10 have been plagued by weird color problems. Upgrading to NCurses 4.2 works, as do the hints in section VI of readme.1st.
2. The latest libc versions seem to be creating trouble.
3. The keyboard configuration under X needs manual work.
4. Directories linked across networks seem to be creating trouble.
5. Colors under X need manual work.
6. ADOM occasionally seems to have problems with old a.out NCurses libraries.

Free BSD

1. ADOM occasionally seems to have problems with old a.out NCurses libraries.
2. See Linux above.

Windows (whatever)

1. Don't run ADOM from within Windows. Strange crashes have been reported with Windows 98 (and they can't stem from internal problems of ADOM: one person reported trying to restart a saved game several times from a backup - sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't).
2. Be careful about the amount of disk space taken up by virtual memory (your swap disk). You hopefully know what that is...
3. Always try to run ADOM from the DOS shell.
4. When using long file names in your path to ADOM (longer than 8+3 characters), you must set the following at the DOS prompt or in your autoexec.bat:
   set LFN=y

OS/2

1. See Windows above.