Fountain of Dreams - Intro

Fountain of Dreams is a 1990 role-playing video game developed and published by Electronic Arts for MS-DOS as a successor to 1988's Wasteland. The game was originally intended as a follow-up to Wasteland, but neither Interplay nor any of the creative team that created Wasteland worked on it. In effect, the game engine is similar, but was created from scratch, and in 2003, Electronic Arts dropped all claims that the game had any connection to Wasteland. Fountain of Dreams was part of the beginning of a trend at EA to produce in-house sequels to its previous titles.

The game was written and programmed by Dave Albert and Banjo Bob Hardy. Graphics and artwork were done by Peggy A. Brennan, Cynthia Hamilton, and Alan J. Murphy.

The only known platform is DOS. The game requires MS DOS 3.0 and higher and supported EGA, MCGA, Tandy / PCJr, and VGA graphics. However, the game did not utilize many advanced features of the VGA controller. All images/graphics are limited to a set of 16 colors.

The game came on two 5.25" 360 KB floppy disks. There doesn't seem to be any copy protection. The game should be installed on a hard drive, although I'm not sure if this was a requirement.

Disk 1 contained the following files:

110114 1990-04-16 12:18 F1.PAK
242262 1990-04-16 12:19 F1.RAW
  7241 1990-03-30 16:05 INSTALL.EXE
      

Disk 2 contained the following files:

 62694 1990-04-16 12:19 F2.PAK
297081 1990-04-16 12:19 F2.RAW
    

Based on the release date and some initial analysis of the game executables it appears that Microsoft C 6.0 (1989) was used to build this game. This compiler used the Microsoft Run-Time Library (RTL) which handled stack checks and provided exception handling in DOS-based applications. The presence of RTL error codes are visible in the game executables.

Most functions appear to follow cdecl calling convention, although there appears to be some routines that perhaps used inline assembly or use some custom calling convention not commonly used by C.