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[Ohne Mitleid]

I'm trying to clean out all of the games on my drive that don't/didn't work. I have a copy of Stephen King's interactive fiction game "The Mist" from 1984. I couldn't remember why it was in my 'Deletion Decision' folder until I started to play. The game is timed by number of moves, and frequent deaths occur which necessitates saving the game. Problem? I could not figure out how to save. The option to save is there, but it seems I need to have the actual disks (I assume 5.25" floppies) to swap out so the game would register a saved file. One disk was to be for the Game, which I could easily DosBox play from my hard drive. The other was a Storage disk needed for game saves/loads. I finally got it to work, but I don't know why it does.

The game was mounted with 'mount c c:\oldgames\mist'. After many combinations of trying to get the game to save, the closest I could get was to have the game offer to initialize the save disk. This would return a ERROR - DISK IS WRITE PROTECTED, which also couldn't be circumvented. As a final effort, I created an image of a blank 180k floppy and mounted it as 'imgmount d c:\oldgames\mist\storage.img -t floppy'. When I was asked to initialize the disk as before, the game directed me to save the game in my choice of 1-9 slots, and everything was fine.

After saving, the directory listing reflects a file named SAVE, consisting of 0 bytes which contain no data, and a file named SAVEX, where 'X' equals the number slot chosen for the save game. From this point forward, you are able to save and restore without the need of the virtual drive... understood.

The name of the image file or different drive letters associated with mounting anything make no difference. These are the unanswered questions I have:
- The SAVE files are not written to the virtual img file or the imgmount drive, only to the root drive (c, in this case). Why?
- Is the creation of the SAVE file and recognizing that an alternate disk exists based on the application finding something in the directory listing? I don't understand.
If anyone has any answers, please feel free to post. I just got lucky but would like to know why it worked, if possible.
Thank you!
Ohne