Windows 10 user here.

First of all, thank you for making this PC version.
Unfortunately I am unable to run it. I tried running as administrator,
Windows 7 compatibility mode and nothing works. I just get blue screen.
I will upload picture which hopefully can be of a help on how to fix this issue.

Quote from OCG on 08/02/2020, 19:27

Windows 10 user here.

First of all, thank you for making this PC version.
Unfortunately I am unable to run it. I tried running as administrator,
Windows 7 compatibility mode and nothing works. I just get blue screen.
I will upload picture which hopefully can be of a help on how to fix this issue.

Thank you @ogc, also known as Old Classic Gamer!

Thank you for leting us know about this issue.

I will advice @shikotei about it.

First of all, thank you for playing! Or trying to.. it seems that I've added bugs when I added support for an ini file.

The cause does not lie with the working of the ini file, but with the way I programmed the finding of this file.

In short, I've forgot to remove the hardcoded path to my ini file. That path is too specific to exist on all systems and it caused a crash. Simply put: I made a stupid mistake that would've been prevented by testing on more than just my machine.
The fixed version (11.3e) is now online. The exe is dated february 8th, 2020 22:18.

That is what I call on-line support!

Thank you @shikotei for solving this issue, and thankn you @ocg for reporting your issue!

Quote from Shikotei on 08/02/2020, 23:49

First of all, thank you for playing! Or trying to.. it seems that I've added bugs when I added support for an ini file.

The cause does not lie with the working of the ini file, but with the way I programmed the finding of this file.

In short, I've forgot to remove the hardcoded path to my ini file. That path is too specific to exist on all systems and it caused a crash. Simply put: I made a stupid mistake that would've been prevented by testing on more than just my machine.
The fixed version (11.3e) is now online. The exe is dated february 8th, 2020 22:18.

Thank you a lot for fixing it @shikotei, much appreciated.
The game runs perfectly.

I have two questions if not a problem to answer:

1. Will there be an update that will allow the game to be on fullscreen without black bars? On my monitor when I press Alt + Enter, the game does go on fullscreen but it is not truly stretched to my 2K monitor and there are black bars. I would love to see more scaling options available and also if possible, the option without filters so that we have sharp pixels. When played on MESSUI Emulator, I can configure without filter and I love to have it with pixels. IMO, a good solution would be that the window for the game has on top stuff such as File, Options, etc. Something kinda like how Earthworm Jim 95 has. It would be pretty cool for an update. Of course, this is only a suggestion and if it's not possible to be implemented, I will understand it.

2. When playing the game, in the upper left corner it is written with red letters: "Watcher"
I am just curious to know what is such writing supposed to mean.

Thanks in advance for reading this.

Note to self: do not debug late night after a long day..

The red "watcher" is a text-only element I use to show the value of variables when testing out new things. It's perfectly harmless. And was last used to try to fix the one bug I can't seem to get rid of... it's a frame-perfect bug that makes Marvin fall through a moving platform that occurs when Marvin is at the zenith of his jump and the platform is exactly 1 pixel below him going up. It's a *bleep* to trigger and even worse to fix. How do you test if something does NOT occur?

You mentioned the black bars and the filters: they're there because I'm new to Unity and it's scaling options.

I've actually looked into getting the full-screen scaling set to "nearest neighbor" or similar non-blurry scaling, but so far no luck. It is one thing Director did better!
The black bars are probably solvable by fiddling with the resolution of the related Unity Scenes. Or by some camera settings I haven't looked into yet.
The thing is that the Philips and Vision Factory intros are in a "full-screen" resolution (384x280) and the rest of the game is 360x220. The black bars were added as padding to get a consistent 384x280.
I could simply crop off the edges of the intros, but the purist in me tells me not to do this. There has to be a better way.

At some point I do want to get rid of them, I just don't have enough knowledge of Unity to do so (yet).
Parts of these things are legacy choices from when I started in Director. Maybe Unity has the ability to switch output resolution mid-game..

Thank you a lot for answering all my questions 🙂

Thank you so much for this port! This was my childhood game 🙂

I have a question regarding controls. How can I map my xbox360 controller to play this game? I managed to map the A and B button, but not the movement stick.

Hey Shadash!

We are happy so see you here!

Can you tell me if you are using a USB2CDi converter to get your XBOX360 working on CD-i?

If not, please let me know which one you are using.

Oof.. unfortunately I didn't expect a controller to be used!

I looked a bit around and found the following image:

from the Unity site: https://answers.unity.com/questions/1350081/xbox-one-controller-mapping-solved.html

Because I don't own a 360 controller I can't test if it works. I think the values sent to the game (-1 to 1) won't work, because I check if a button is pressed. My guess is that pushing the stick in any direction will have the same effect, as in push left goes left, push right goes left.

It might work if you map the buttons that have a return value of "0 to 1".

How did you map the A and B buttons? What does your .ini file look like?

Hi Shikotei

First of all, thank you for the amazing PC port of The Apprentice.  I loved playing it......until this happened in the screenshot. Has anyone had this happen to them and how do I fix it?

I can't seem to get it out of the bottom corner.  The window won't resize and there's no way to get it to recentre in the window.  I've tried everything I can think of, deleting the ini, adjusting the resolution, compatibility mode, making it full screen.  Loads of things.  Nothing works.

The unity start up picture looks fine, but as soon as it loads the game it's permanently in that corner and is now unplayable.

I have a Windows 7 laptop with an extended desktop.  Can anyone help please?

Thanks

Welcome Thendakor!

@shikotei

Any idea?

Hello @shikotei

I have several questions.

Can you tell me if it's possible to launch your PC port from a Bin image or similar? It may not be possible for legal reasons. I haven't managed to do it.

I also wanted to know if you recommend the EU or US edition of the game?

Do you think it would be technically possible for an amateur translator to translate this game into French? There's a bit of text and I believe there are a few images with text. I'll have to investigate, but I wanted to get your opinion.

Thank you very much for this PC port, it's a huge job and it's hard to imagine how much testing you had to do to finalize this project in style.

Thanks a million!

hey @shikotei 

There's a bug where after beating the first boss, the game loops you back to the beginning. I've tried using different roms and deleting the INI file but nothing seems to work. I'm not sure why this is occurring but if you could fix this then that would be a great help.