It Wasn't a Dream: Tombstone for Windows 3.1

Let's cut to the chase. I remembered this game. I knew it existed. I knew it played something like Indiana Jones' Desktop Adventures. Could I find it? No. Does it exist? Yes. Have I found it? Very yes.

Striking Gold

Searching online for this think I came up with nothing, though I tried a few times over the years I never found myself getting any further, though one fateful day I did find a reddit thread about this exact game, while nobody else could find anything, it did it least prove to be that I hadn't dreamt the entire thing up. For a few years nothing much changed. Searches didn't help and I continued to write it off as a lost cause. Earlier today I checked the reddit thread once more and was quite amused to see someone else looking for the game but there still being no other progress.

Then I decided to search on archive.org, and up came a couple of PC World cover disks (discs I guess, being CDs) - the second is the one I've used. I'd already decided this was the most likely avenue of finding the thing, but searching archive.org in the past had proved fruitless, so I was quite heartened when a search for "tombstone" in the software archive brought these disk images up. It seems odd that I'd not found these before since these images were added in 2021, but upon inspecting the contents of the April 1996 image I found the game files and quickly downloaded the .iso.

Running IT

At first I tried running the CD-ROM menu program using Wine, but had no luck for some reason. I tried the game's installer too but with similar results. Then I remembered that I only had to hit a button to fire up my old Pentium machine - so I did that, dug the keyboard out from behind my desk and set about getting the game onto it. DOS booted fine, but for some reason network file transfers on it are running super slowly. Small files (up to around 100KB) are super quick, but beyond that it seems to stall for ages at a time. It would likely have been faster to dig out a floppy but I was feeling lazy and left it to run.

When that was finally done I eagerly fired up the installer, only to get an error message. A quick view of the bundled text file indicated how to solve that: updating VER.DLL for my Win 3.1 installation with one bundled with the game. Times have definitely changed. Once that was done the installer ran without issues, and the game started! I grabbed some screenshots, but hit a snag: the window is rather large, bigger than the view of the canvas size in Paint, and paint seems to only paste into the visible part of the buffer. Undeterred I rebooted into Win95 to see if it would run there, and sure enough that worked fine, and apparently by that time Microsoft had seen fit to fix that particular Paint bug, so here it is... Tombstone!

Next Up...

Other than playing it, the next task is to see if I can track down the author, one David Graham who sold it through a company (possibly unregistered) called D.G Soft. Mobygames has a Dave Graham, could be the same guy, we'll see, with some luck. It took me my surprise to discover it was a UK game. Then again, perhaps that's why it was (seemingly) relatively unknown?

Grab It!

I'll be donating to arhive.org off the back of finding this, but to save them a little data transfer, and save anyone who cares some time, you can download a zip of the installer directory here. I assume the Shareware usage is still good. Once I've worked out why my old DOS PC is running so slowly, I'll grab a copy of the installed directory, but all the installer appears to do is run EXPAND on each of the files, renaming them to proper file extensions on the way.