[Old GOAT: Part 3 of Ultima IV!]

The tl;dw on last night's Ultima IV Old GOAT: I explored a few new towns, acquired two new party members (Dupre the Paladin and Julia the Tinker) and found that equipping everyone with bows is awesome 🙂 (Poor Dupre is actually stuck with a sword for now.) So now we have four of the maximum eight characters. Feels like the party is growing pretty quickly. 😁

 

Also finally got to acquiring spell reagents and mixing some spells, including several Cures (which cures poison) which helped for the several times we got poisoned 🤮 and we found the Shrine of Sacrifice as well.

 

My plan is to do a small amount of grinding offline to get Dupre a bow as well, and upgrade Julia's armor. maybe try to do a bit of leveling up and getting more spells mixed as well.

then we shall resume the Quest of the Avatar on the next Old GOAT!

 

[Happy 44th to Intellivision!]

Games played on this stream:

08:10 Lock 'n' Chase
24:31 Lock 'n' Chase: Revenge of Lupin
37:42 Happy Trails
51:55 King of the Mountain
01:07:05 Christmas Carol
01:17:34 BurgerTime
01:36:15 Super Chef BurgerTime
02:15:38 Diner!
02:27:06 Battlestar Galactica Space Battle
02:49:06 Commando
02:57:20 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons aka Cloudy Mountain aka Crown of Kings
03:12:30 DK Arcade
03:26:17 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin aka Minotaur

[The Intellivision 44th Birthday Party Continues!]

Index of games played this stream:
07:12 Caverns of Mars
23:07 Kool-Aid Man
45:13 Keystone Kopps
01:03:40 Fast Food Plus
01:17:25 Pinball
01:29:29 Safecracker - reading the manual
01:42:05 Safecracker - playing the game
01:54:15 Intellivania
02:03:58 Yogi's Frustration
02:13:46 Hotel Bunny
02:26:58 Mystic Castle
03:07:23 King of the Mountain

[The Intellivision 44th Birthday Party Continues!]

Wow, I had a ton of fun last night. Somehow I can never get enough of playing Intellivision - one of my favorite old school consoles for sure. 😄

Thanks to @Brian's Man Cave for joining as I played a couple of his games!

[The Intellivision 44th Birthday Party Continues!]

Calling it officially a 9:00 pm start time.

[The Intellivision 44th Birthday Party Continues!]

Notifying @Brian's Man Cave in case you'd like to see someone play your games, among others! I'd be happy to have you in the chat. 😁

[The Intellivision 44th Birthday Party Continues!]

@Charlie Cat just thought I'd alert you again in case you can join us in the chat! It was great having you last week.

[Happy 44th to Intellivision!]

@Charlie Cat are you around to join me in the chat? Would love to have you as one of our honored guests. 😁

[MenuMaker 0.3]

@SpiceWare it works! To be a little more precise, the following was my test:

1. Ran MenuMaker_04beta2.app on my M1 Mac running MacOS Monterey (12.1)
2. Deleted all the .men files, as well as the .rtf file from the SD card.
3. Clicked the make button and waited until it succeeded.
4. Popped the SD card in the "new" (2019) VecMulti, powered on the Vectrex, and saw a non-garbled menu.
5. Tried loading a game (Armor Attack) and it ran.

Great to know there's a functioning, MacOS-native version for the new VecMultis. Thanks for the work you do for the Vectrex community!

 

[MenuMaker 0.3]

Great - I'll give it a test run on my newer VecMulti probably tomorrow morning.

[MenuMaker 0.3]

6 hours ago, SpiceWare said:

I suspect it no longer uses the |^M| from the older version as it's being displayed by the new VecMulti's menu routine (the double-bars with the space between them, the ^M is a RETURN character).

 

I haven't booted Windows so long it's busy doing updates. Once it's done I'll run the new MenuMaker and see what it does.

Wow, it's so simple. Apologies for the mixup. I take it you don't need me to send the .rtf file then? I have no problem doing so if you do need it; just sounds like you've got it figured out already is all. ?

[MenuMaker 0.3]

Update: I got the MenuMaker.exe from the SD card to work in Crossover. I've attached a couple of screenshots to demonstrate, that may help somebody else out there. Before the first screenshot, I had created a Bottle in Crossover - I don't think I set any special settings - you can just do Bottle -> New Bottle and select Windows 7 or 10, or whatever.

 

Now, when the MenuMaker app would launch, I would press the MAKE button and get a file write error. Turns out I had to grant "Network" drive access in MacOS to get that to work. But I wasn't prompted by the OS to grant such access when the MenuMaker requested the access. The way I got it was in the wine configuration editor in Crossover, I tried to browse the SD card mounted to /Volumes/VECMULTI, and THEN once I hit the Browse button, I was prompted to grant access, so I did. Smooth sailing from there. You can probably just go to your security settings and set up these permissions, rather than do so in a reactive manner. Not sure of the specific steps offhand.

 

Screenshots don't show the error or the prompt to grant permissions - I didn't capture those.

 

And of course, I confirmed that the VecMulti menu worked. That's all I've got for now!

[MenuMaker 0.3]

@SpiceWare Here you go sir. Just to be clear: the attachment is a zip containing the four .men files generated by the Windows MenuMaker.exe included on the SD card that comes with the 2019 VecMulti (I believe I have that year right). MenuMaker.exe is also included in the zip. I only added four roms to the Games dir that I generated the menu for, as I figure for the purpose of reverse engineering the format, it might be best to have multiple items but not an overwhelming number of them. (I guess there's one .menu file per rom?) Let me know if you need anything else though.

 

Below is a video of my test run. The generated menu seems to work, but I did encounter a separate technical issue that I'm just documenting here. In short, it appears I can't load any ROMs unless I hit the reset button once. I don't think it's the menu's "fault" but rather a VecMulti bug or limitation.

 

Thank you!

 

 

MenuMakerFilesForSpice.zip

[MenuMaker 0.3]

Thank you for the response @SpiceWare and I appreciate you looking at this. I can borrow my wife's Windows laptop (I only have a Macbook Pro and a couple of Linux boxes) and run MenuMaker.exe that was preinstalled on the SD card packaged with the VecMulti. Hopefully it will work for me and I can send you the resulting menu files as well.

 

Just as an aside, I also tried running MenuMaker.exe using Crossover (which I mainly use for games) but no luck there, heh. I'm kind of new to Crossover so maybe it just needs a config tweak that I'm not aware of. I've attached screenshots for the morbidly curious.

 

 

[MenuMaker 0.3]

Hi @SpiceWare - I'm not having luck getting the generated menu to work. Might you have any idea why the menu is mangled as shown in this video? It was suggested to me by a member of the FB group Vectrex Fans Unite that I could try truncating the filenames to 12 characters each. I did so and had no luck. (The video only shows my attempt with the original, longer file names.) I'm on MacOS Monterey (12.1), using MenuMaker 0.3. I confirmed the SD card was formatted to FAT. Thanks.