Cannot install Return of the Phantom

[BergQuester]

I am trying to import Return of the Phantom from Microprose. However, when I click the install button, I get a dialog box stating that the "The game needs 0 bytes of disk space. You only have 0 bytes available."

[BergQuester]

Was able to install using these instructions: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?p=153724

[alinebee]

Thanks for bringing this game to my attention, and glad that you were at least able to hack around the issue!

ripsaw8080, a VOGONS contributor, offers an explanation and fix for the underlying problem in a related thread: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=24859

I'll look at including this fix into the next version of Boxer. Until then I've reopened the issue.

[BergQuester]

Cool.

Another thing I found, when trying to copy the game's directories to the C: drive, it seemed to have copied them as though they were single files. Both Boxer and Finder recognized the copied folders as files. I worked around the issue by copying the folders with Finder, which Boxer then recognized as folders. I don't know if I was doing something wrong (my old DOS prompt skills were never that sharp to begin with) or if it's a bug. If it sounds like a bug, I can create a detailed report for you.

Thanks for the reply and thanks for the incredible work on Boxer. I found the project via Arstechnica.

[alinebee]

This isn't a bug, but an undesired consequence of how (badly) MS-DOS works. If you copy multiple files to a new destination, and that destination doesn't have a trailing slash to mark it as a directory, then the copy command will instead concatenate all the source files into one big file with the same name as the directory you were trying to copy them into. This shitty gotcha is how the original DOS copy command worked and unfortunately this has to be faithfully emulated for certain installers to work.

In general it's far easier and safer to do all your file operations via Finder instead. To assist with this, Boxer has a REVEAL command that will open the current DOS directory (or a specified directory) in Finder.