Hello and welcome to a nice little release from Demonlord!

I've managed to rip booting Pinball Construction Set from disk to a DOS EXE...
(Pinball Construction Set is (c) Bill Budge/Electronic Arts 1982-85)

I've created a full INT 13 handler that will handle all the program's calls
to INT 13 (disk interrupt). I've managed to fix so you can have the files on
your HD, and the program will load them from there. I used most of the MCS
handler, so there wasn't as much involved here as in MCS, but it still took
a number of hours to finish... (Don't run this from disk! It won't work! It
has to run from HD to work properly!)

The ripped version, and Pinball Construction Set itself has a few limitations.
These are listed here below, and should not be confused as bugs...

* The file PINBALL.PIC has to exist in the current directory for PCS to work
  at all. Make sure this file is there...

* PCS doesn't handle table files larger than 4000 bytes. This is fully
  supported by my handler, so there's no problem there. I don't know what
  happens if a file becomes larger...

* PCS looks for 2 different kinds of files, first PINBALL.PIC, and later
  *.PB. I've made the handler only look for these kinds of files. This is
  since PCS only handles 63 files on the current disk. Remember, it's an
  old program! If you have more than 63 PIC and PB files in the current
  directory, you won't be able to load the files that are following the
  first 63. You also won't be able to save any more tables if you already
  have 63 of these files in the current directory.

* This program HAS to be run from HD to work properly! It checks the drive
  number when intercepting INT 13 calls, only letting through reads to drives
  80h+ (80h is harddisk C:). Since I use INT 21 (DOS interrupt) to handle
  files on HD, INT 21 will also call INT 13 to make its own reads and writes,
  but the drive will be 80h+, since it IS run from HD. If you run this from
  disk, the INT 21 reads and writes will also be intercepted since they're
  not 80h+ (above 7fh). Haven't tried what happens, and I won't, but don't
  blame me if you're stupid enough to try... And hopefully you're smart
  enough to read the docs to a program before running it!

* Every function in the disk menu works, except FORMAT. I've disabled this
  on purpose, since there's no need to use PCS to format disks... The other
  commands in the disk menu are:
  LOAD - Loads a saved pinball table
  SAVE - Saves the current table
  QUIT - Quits back to the drawing board
  MAKE GAME - Saves current table to a standalone DOS COM file. It even
              creates an AUTOEXEC.BAT that would've started the table
              automatically if it'd been saved to a bootdisk. Don't run this
              from the root of your bootdrive, since it will overwrite your
              real AUTOEXEC.BAT! If you want to create a game, you have to
              have 2 spots open in your directory (max 61 .PIC and .PB files
              in current directory)
  PLAY GAME - Play/preview current table


If you enter any parameter after PCS.EXE, it will disable the Quit feature
(Ctrl-X). This is because some computers have had problems with this
feature, so to work around that, I've added this parameter thing. To run the
program with quit enabled, simply run PCS.EXE. To disable quit, in case it
crashes your computer, or whatever, just run PCS.EXE with any parameter, like
PCS.EXE 1 (or anything, really).

The default extension for saved pinball tables is .PB. This can't be altered,
so if you copy tables from anywhere else, make sure they have this extension!


Hope you'll enjoy this old, but very cool program.

I have tried this under several OS's (MSDOS 3.3, 5.0 and 6.2, PC-DOS 7,
Windoze 98 & NT). It runs under all, but I can't get any sound under Windoze.
A clean boot is probably preferred, but not at all required.

Enjoy!

(any questions can be sent to demonlord@swipnet.se)
