The Zork Library Forum

I went to gamestop a little while ago and was browsing through the old computer games section when I saw a repackaged copy of Return to Zork (One of the ones I have missed, unfortunately)! After checking the price and what I had on me, I figured I would sacrifice the used copy of Megaman X4 I was going to pick up to pay the price ($5), but when I approached the checkout lady, she told me they were getting rid of that old stock and I could have it for a penny. Needless to say, I purchased it and took it home in utter excitement.

Unfortunately, fate smote me and it fails to run on my computer...

A waste of space, I know, but I had to share my sad story.

WOOT! one penny saddens me though... such a great game.

I bought System Shock 1 yes the ORIGINAL from 1994.. I got the CD version for $4 and it didn't run, needless to say I took the time to get Win98 and DOS running and configured. It ran and ran perfect. That is seriously a SWEET game. Totally worth $50 and I got it for $4!!!! :-D

I had a horrible time getting RTZ to run on my PC when I got it in December...I spent something like 1/2 hour trying to get the blasted game to work.  

Sorry for your bad luck though.

I have RTZ. And it also fails to work on my computer.

I got it to run on my Win 95 compy, but the sound doesn't work. And the dialogue is very important on Return to Zork, so ... Additionally, the animations are really sped-up. o.O

I'd try putting it on my Win 3.1 box, but the idiot who released this version of RTZ put the thing on a CD-ROM. But it's still a DOS game. That means it doesn't even work on my Win 95 machine without a Win 98 boot disk. And since Win 3.1 doesn't even have a CD-ROM drive ...

*sigh* I'll just mark that as a Zork game I shall never actually beat.

Win3.1 no CDRom? you say it doesn't support one? it should? Also if you want to run the games from DOS boot into DOS not windows. You might have to configure your config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but I have a DOS page I created for help on this.

Heres the URL: http://personal.thezorklibrary.com/dos.htm

Wow, that makes me wish my dad had not thrown out our old machines.

I can't believe we have four computers all ME or above.

Hmm, RTZ always worked fine for me...

-GF

If you're on a Windows NT based OS (NT, 2000, XP) then try a program called VDMS.  It allows older DOS based games to run in the newer Windows OSs.

It helped me run RTZ just fine, with sound and everything.

Same here.  VDMS is how I got RTZ to work, with sound and everything.

VDM Sound is a sound emulation program and will not emulate pure DOS. If the game works but without sound then use VDM; however if the game won't run even with sound off then VDM will not help.

you can find it at sourceforge.net

VDMS also helps with RAM issues as well since most DOS games need as much conventional memory (640k or lower) as possible.