[rogueclone-cvs] Fixes for Rogue Clone IV in the Windows 7 / 8 / 10 console environment

[William A. <wil...@au...>]

Rogue Clone IV Developers,

 

I have a fix to an annoying issue in Rogue Clone IV for the newer Windows
environments. Evidently, around about Windows 7 and since, the Visual Studio
console environment has not supported a "bell" function. That is, there no
sound generated when you send ASCII 7 (or CTL-g or '\a', whatever your
preference) to stdout.

 

Moreover, on my system, when the bell character was sent to the console, the
console promptly dies, leaving a zombie rogue.exe process spinning in the
background. So you lose your game, and you are burning cycles; not good. If
you play Rogue at a reasonable pace (like me - my brain doesn't play the
game, my fingers do) then a bell will inevitably come, and there goes the
game. I have tested the download from sourceforge on my machine, and sure
enough, it exhibits this same behavior.

 

I have a relatively simple solution that I have implemented and  tested. It
uses the Windows multimedia system and plays a .wav file (my default file is
the sound of a metal-on-metal "clank") whenever the bell is invoked.
Admittedly, this is more like Windows than Unix, where I first played BSD
Rogue. But, hey, it works.

 

There are other issues to work around when compiling this code with a
modern language system like, ahem, Visual Studio 2015. The issue of const
string literals will kill you if you try to compile in a modern C/C++
syntax. Luckily, Visual Studio seems to have the flags that allows old,
crazy C code to be compiled. I spent most of a day figuring this out.

 

Since this is a structural change (one more source file, plus the .wav sound
file), I wanted to find out if this mailing list would approve this update.
Let me know.

 

Willie Anderson