Good Morning Guys!
Finally had time for other matters yesterday, so I took another crack at trying to see if I could get joysticks to work on Trials of Battle (TOB).
For the members of the crowd who haven't been around this operating system only forever, after Galactic Civilizations it was one of the few actual games produced solely and specifically for OS/2 by a retail company, for commercial sale. (Galactic Civilizations was ported to Windows later - originally it was designed solely for OS/2)
I had bought a retail copy from Stardock back when it came out in 1995, and still had it in the original box up to a few years ago, when I was trying to clean up my office of all the software and boxes that accumulated over 30 or so years. I stored away the CD but don't recall if it ever came with a manual (if so, it is now missing, so I had no reference points to go by other than sketchy information on the internet, the Read.Me, a review and fuzzy recollections from originally playing the game.
Anyway, I was finally able to determine that all the functions of the game were accessed from the hanger screen, an annotated version of which I've attached to this post. If you move the mouse cursor about, the cursor changes from red to green when there is a hidden menu flyout present.
These are four in number:
(see the picture for the location of the numbers below):
1 - Storage Equipment Inventory
2 - Options Menu
3 - Arena Entrance
4 - System Damage Report and Repair screen
Clicking on the location I've marked (2) brings up the options screen. The second button down on the right side of the menu, when pressed, brings up a flyout where you can choose whether you want to use a joystick or mouse as part of the controls of the game. This is where you can also calibrate the joystick.
While I still have a hard lock-up after a certain length of time, I can report that, running Wim's driver set and the appropriate xevents.cmd for the joystick in question, I now have joystick control in TOB.
The controls allowed are very simple in nature, consisting of Buttons 1 and 2 and movement using the joystick. The menu choices are hard coded, so you can't customize anything. But at least we've found another native OS/2 game that confirms that Wim's efforts are paying off. Big kudos again to you. Sir!
As mentioned I am still getting the hard lock-ups after various periods of time. I will explain what I've tried so far to alleviate that, in another post.
Also, I don't know if any of you have ever gone to Internet Archive (
www.archive.org).
I've found a lot of interesting legacy items which have been placed there for posterity. They do have an ISO of the original game disk there, in their CD collection. The disk is required to both install the game and it needs to be present in the system while the game is running.
I don't know, Martin, if you ever have checked with Stardock as to whether the game is considered abandonware now, or not. I have downloaded the ISO from there, burned it and it runs fine - I have returned my original retail copy of TOB to sleep in its storage case.
Have a great weekend, Ladies and Gentlemen and Best!
M