Americans in Space

What works

The Tandy VIS was a embedded Windows 3.0 machine with Multimedia Extensions, apart some proprietary libraries that can be freely downloaded from the following link:

 http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30107

 And extracted to the Wineprefix equivalent of:

C:\windows\system

(Do not extract to system32 or syswow64)

- Finally, just open the disc image, and click on present.exe inside the "present" folder inside the root disc directory.

 - The images, audio narrations and text appears to be working fine.

- The application opens a 640*480 window which even for FullHD screens is still usable. It is highly recomended to use the "Virtual Desktop" feature for better application handling.

 - Mouse and keyboard events are operational inside the program menus.

What does not

- Full Motion Videos (MPEG1) won't play inside the program, due to the fact the program tries to call an nonexistence MPEG1 video processor, since the AMD clone of Intel 80286 wouldn't make the job itself.

 - And a silly discovery... The Tandy VIS firmware mounts the CD-ROM drive as the drive A:, and this application (and some anothers) was hard-coded the A: drive path when loads the assets. Without open "winecfg", and mount the root CD-ROM title as a A: drive the program will warn, in a series  of pop-ups, that can't find that file asset, and the Wine sub-system should be killed.

Workarounds

What was not tested

-Not so much.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

As explains in another reports, the VIS loads the control.tat file that specifies the title and minwin.com (Loads Modular Windows) (In this case: minwin a:\present) Then minwin.com parses the system.ini (a:\present\system.ini), which on [boot] section contains the main executable... shell=pr.exe And the program starts In Wine, just double-click the pr.exe executable, after define the disc mount directory as A: drive in winecfg - This becuase Tandy VIS has defined the CD-ROM as A: drive - I think that the built-in Modular Windows ROM are mounted as a C: drive, and the memory card as a B: drive, however it cannot be verified - Since the consumer PC when VIS was released to the market (1993) until 2000 their firmwares hardcodes the A: (and B:) drivers for the floppy disk, and the core MS-DOS follows that pattern, by defining in some VIS titles the fact the A: drive was the CD-ROM (On MS-DOS you can't define above D: letter), this simpler trick prevents the execution of VIS titles on standard computers. (Which was in line with some retro-gaming threads, since no 386SX or 486 computer could load at all several VIS titles due to non-standard libraries or uncommon incompatibilities.) - However in Windows NT machines or programs like DosBox or Wine it is easily circumvented, since the DOS drive letters can be changed on runtime, and it is just a mount convention to maintain backward compatibility with the Windows software.