Windows 10, ZMud, and Other Options

Having gotten the new system up and running and most everything transferred over, it was time to start looking into what was working and what was not.

Some things I opted to install over from scratch anyway.  The Zinstall transfer utility copied things to the matching drives on the new system, but since I had a small SSD there, meant really for Windows, the page file, and whatever absolutely HAD to go on the C drive, that meant some software I wanted on the new, 1TB SSD would need a fresh install.  World of Warcraft and EVE Online were the primary candidates for that.

WoW was, of course, easy.  It installed, found my settings, and got on with life.  EVE Online though… well, I got it going, but the profile options it gave me all seemed to be very old.  I was only really worried about my overview settings, and now I have something that is at least a year old, from the point when you could only have six overview tabs.  But at least the settings were basically there, I just have to remember to go in and check the box for ship types that were added since that time when I pull up a pre-set.

Other things could just live where they were placed, so long as they ran.  So, for example, Steam and all my games from that live on the 3TB D drive.  The same with an assortment of other MMOs that I do not play currently.  Most seemed to work, though the copy process seemed to have broken things from Daybreak.  EverQuest and EverQuest II won’t run, erroring out when the launcher comes up.  Such is life.

And then there were the oddball things.  I have dragged a lot of stuff forward from computer to computer over the years.  I’ve dug out stuff from the late 80s when sorting through archived directories.  Most of that is made up of documents.  I think there are a couple in there that I might have copied from my Apple //e to my MacSE way back in the day.

But there are some old apps that I have carried forward or acquired.  There is a copy of Civilization II – Gold Edition that I had to pick up on eBay when I moved to Win7 64-bit and found that support for 16-bit executables, like my original copy of Civ II, wasn’t a thing.

And then there is ZMud, which has been around for a while.

ZMud – Version 7.21 from October 2005

I have been running a copy of ZMud since the late 1990s.  Back when I was working on Macintosh products a friend at Apple got me the Windows compatibility card so I could run Windows in a window and ZMud in that.  It was such a giant leap ahead of the terminal emulator I was running on the Mac.

Later, when Apple looked to be dying and Michael Dell was suggesting that the company ought to liquidate and give the money to the investors and having Mac experience on your resume was just slightly better than McDonald’s, I managed to find a spot in a company that enterprise software on Windows NT based mostly on my experience with telephony, modems, and ISDN.

Since I prefer to have the same setup at home as the office, I too moved over to Windows, and have been there ever since.  And so I could run ZMud natively.  Since I was playing TorilMUD as my main game, I invested a lot of time in customizing ZMud with triggers and shortcuts and aliases and such.

But most of the value in the client was in the maps.  When I do posts about zones and such in TorilMUD you can see screen shots of the maps.

Kobold Village – Surface Map

In a MUD you cannot “see” the terrain, you can only see what is in the room with you and the exits.  It can be hard to keep your orientation, especially when a wily zone designer doesn’t stick to an absolute perfect grid.  And while long experience with some zones means I have some paths memorized, a lot of my ability to get around in the world of TorilMUD depends on those maps.

So you can imagine the sick feeling I had when ZMud wouldn’t run on the new system.

Okay, I knew it wouldn’t run straight out of the box.  It is from a different era of computing.  But I had fixed it up and gotten it running before, the last time being less than a year back.  All I had to do was set it to run as Administrator and set the compatibility profile for Windows XP SP2 and I ought to have been set.

But then it still wouldn’t run.  It was throwing MDAC, or Microsoft Data Access Components, errors.  That was a different problem altogether.

ZMud keeps its maps and its character database in what we used to call the Microsoft Jet Database format.  That, too, is some pretty ancient technology and has long since been superseded in the Microsoft lineup, but the backward compatibility used to always be there.

Database problems are not my area of expertise.  I am the person they make the GUI admin tool for.  But I figured somebody else must have had this problem before, so started the Google trek to find a solution.  A few hours and several utilities later however, things did not look good.  I went to bed thinking all that data was lost.

However, something I did seemed to have done the trick and the one final shut down and boot made it take effect, because when I resumed the next day the client launched and I was able to log in.

Still, I feel I am on borrowed time with ZMud.  While I managed to get the MDAC error solved by whatever means, it still doesn’t launch correctly every time.  I suspect there is some conflict that comes with another app loads a particular DLL, though I have to narrow that down.  It does seem to run if I do a reboot and launch it first.

Zugg came out with a replacement for ZMud called CMud, which itself is now more than a decade old.  I have tried to move over to it, as you’re supposed to be able to transition your data from ZMud, however I have not been successful with that on a few attempts over the years.

One client out there I want to take a look into is Mudlet.  It looks a little more modern, but more importantly it looks like there is a path that allows you to move your ZMud maps and such into it.

And, if nothing else, TorilMUD has actually added some level of in-game maps.

The new map in the Hive of the Manscorpions

For now though I am setup again with ZMud so I can finish off a few more posts about zones I want to remember.

Reviving ZMud 7.21

Posting something from my long, ongoing series of memories about TorilMUD always brings out a few of the usual suspects, and my tale of the economy of Waterdeep was no exception.

Xyd, who got me into TorilMUD back in 1993 asked when I was going to post about the zone known as the Elemental Glades.  A strange but essential part of the Leuthilspar Tales series, I have meant to get to that for some time.

The request set me on a path again, but I did not have enough information.  Memory is fleeting and it has been more than a decade since I probably did anything in that zone.  I could sketch a basic outline of the zone, the role it played for us as young elves on Evermeet, early attempts to crack into what the zone really was, and the eventual successful discovery of what the place was really about.

But, for me, a story like that needs details.  It is often the little things that trigger more memories and add depth to a tale.  And to get those details I would have to return to TorilMUD and visit the zone, walk through the rooms, and rediscover the clues left for us.

Actually logging in wasn’t a big deal.  I use Cygwin every day from my Windows box at work to log into our linux servers to run installs, grab logs, and what not.  The command line interface isn’t dead, it isn’t even resting yet.  So getting to the TorilMUD is as easy as typing in:

telnet torilmud.com 9999

The TorilMUD site tells you about it.  I even remember my login credentials.  Piece of cake.

The problem is, again, one of memory.  The mechanics of simply getting into the game are easy.  Finding things in the world… more difficult.  Much more difficult.

Individual rooms in the game can be quite memorable.  Even a few routes, like the one from Finn to Anna’s cottage, are etched into my memory.   But general navigation of the world can be a chore.  People who make MUDs aren’t always very creative with room names.  As I pointed out in a post about eight years ago, there can be a lot of repetition in room names.  Examples from the ZMud map database in that post:

• 94 rooms named “Inside a Large Grove of Shadows”
• 79 rooms named “A Bend in a Passage”
• 58 rooms named “An Abandoned Mine Tunnel”
• 57 rooms named “A Wide Dirt Road”
• 53 rooms named “A Passageway”
• 36 rooms named “A Rocky Trail”
• 29 rooms named “A Trail Through a Forest”
• 22 rooms named “Dense Forest”

So a lot of the time you’re just sitting there with a room name, some info about the size of the room, and the exits.

The Pathway of Peace
Room size: Large (L:30 ft W:75 ft H:500 ft)
Exits: -N -E -S

That wasn’t a ton of help on its own when I was playing the game every day.  A decade after I last did anything serious there and it might as well just say, “Yet Another Room!”

I could piece together how to get to the Elemental Glades, but I would be wandering essentially at random in a zone where there was some danger for even a high level character.

So I felt I had to get ZMud back up and running and with it all of the maps I so carefully made over the years.

In a timely coincidence (I had already written the Waterdeep post but, it not being time sensitive, I actually queued it up to post more than a week later) an old member of the Shades of Twilight guild, Oteb for those who might remember, dropped me a note asking if I still had the stash of information that once outraged the MUD, it being posted openly on the internet, as mentioned in yet another old post of mine.

That got me digging through some external drives in search of some pretty old files.

I did not find the files Oteb asked about, but I did dig out a backup copy of ZMud I had archived away.

Liked being able to connect to TorilMUD, having a copy of ZMud isn’t exactly a challenge.  Good old Zugg still has his site up and you can still download/buy a copy of ZMud or the newer CMud.  Not bad for a little company that has been selling a MUD client since 1995 or so.

The configuration files and, most importantly, the map database file were a big deal.  And it was ZMud 7.21, the final version of the client, so it seemed likely to be somewhat up to date.

I dragged that over to my main drive to see if I could get that going.

The first thing it wanted was a registration code, the 30 day free trial period having ended a long, long time ago.  I am not even sure that ZMud includes that trial any more, given how much Zugg is trying to push people onto CMud.  If you buy a copy of ZMud today you get a copy of CMud in the bargain.  It is a pity that my attempts to migrate to CMud have all failed on the maps part.  And without maps there is no point in moving.

I couldn’t find the license key, but Zugg has a way to recover it on his site.  I also couldn’t remember my password, but you can recover that too.  Fortunately I still have the email address I was using back in 2002 when I bought my current copy.  (I had to rebuy it in a similar situation back then because I did not have the previous email address.)

I was able to run through that and register my copy of ZMud again, but when I went to actually run it, it errored out on a memory addressing issue.  And, of course, Zugg has been very clear on support for ZMud on Windows 7 and beyond:

Because of the new release of Windows 7, we are getting more and more questions about this. So I wanted to make a sticky topic to make this perfectly clear:

zMUD is not supported on Vista, or Windows 7, or any other future version of Windows. Use CMUD instead.

zMUD was originally written for Windows 3.1, then Windows 95. zMUD was kludged to run on Windows XP. Some people might be able to force zMUD to run on Vista and Windows 7, but it is not supported. Beyond just installation and running problems, there are other severe memory limits and other problems with zMUD on newer versions of Windows.

The newer CMUD client was written from scratch specifically for Windows XP, Vista, and newer versions of Windows. CMUD is the only client that is fully supported by Zugg Software at this time.

But I was not deterred.  I have made it run on Win7 before.  I set it up for WinXP compatibility and, when that did not do the trick, set it to run as Administrator, the usual “make it work” solution for older software.

Just work, would you?

That was enough to get it going and I was able to launch, log in, and get the mapper running so I could find my way around.

ZMud lives!

Man, that UI is straight out of 1997, but it works!

And with that I was set.  I could run out to the Elemental Glades and begin work on that post.

So there it is, probably a new low in writing, a post about the work I did so I could write another post.

But I am happy to have ZMud up and running again and there is always the temptation to start playing TorilMUD some more.  We shall see.  First I need an xp group because I deliberately died a bunch of times at one point and dropped from level 50 to level 47.  Those last levels were easy to lose back in the day (you no longer lose levels now) but hard to get back, and you need a group to do it.