The Enhanced edition: the 1986 case file, redrawn

Same file, new paint

The Enhanced edition is the 1986 game rebuilt for better PCs, not a new case. Its city data opens on the same run as the 1986 DOS release (Montgomery, Anchorage, Phoenix, Little Rock, San Francisco, Denver), and its Dossiers menu lists the same sixteen files, Carmen at the top and Benjamin Hana at the bottom. Archive.org's catalogue credits it with VGA graphics, mouse and joystick support and detailed suspect descriptions, and Home of the Underdogs files it as the “VGA enhanced version”. It is a different product from the Deluxe Edition, which replaced the whole gang and moved the chase to new cities in 22 states.

What the rebuild added

The original DOS program (archive.org's copy is “IBM Version 1.1”, © 1986, 1987) already had keyboard and joystick modes and a sound toggle. The DOS user's manual that travels with archive.org's Enhanced set adds a Microsoft-compatible mouse, with the right button standing in for Esc and ALT-J switching the joystick on, and a menu bar across the top: Game (About Carmen, New, Save, Quit), Options (Sound, Joystick), Acme (Detective Roster, Hall of Fame) and Dossiers.

Sound got files of its own, DIGISND.DAT and MIDISND.DAT, and the executable's driver table names adlib, covox, gblast, sblast and tandy alongside stdsnd and ibmg. The program grew to match: the version 1.1 CARMEN.EXE is 29,336 bytes, the v2.3 one 121,189.

The Dossiers menu, which version 1.1 doesn't have, puts each crook's file on screen: name, sex, occupation, hobby, hair colour, car and a comment. Carmen is a Ringleader who gambles, has black hair and wants a car that “must be expensive and have a leather interior”. Wendy Pauper sings with the punk band “Reeking Sewage”; Titus Canby was last seen reading “The Carlsbad Cavern Diet.” Warrants still come from the Crime Computer, which sorts suspects by sex, hair, food, sport, hobby and music.

Builds on file

Sources disagree on a launch year, so the title screens do the talking. The manual is “© Copyright 1986, 1990”, written for “IBM/Tandy and 100% Compatibles”, and offers a CARMEN HERC start-up for Hercules cards; it never mentions VGA or sound cards, so it can't say when those arrived. The build this archive plays reads © 1986, 1991. The copy in archive.org's MS-DOS library reports “MS-DOS Version 2.3, Copyright 1986, 1992”, and a single 720K disk in the Good Old Days floppy collection reports “MS-DOS Version 2.5, Copyright 1986, 1993”. Those two carry the same About Carmen credits: Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott for design, Glenn Axworthy for programming, Tom Rettig for music and sound, plus Leila Joslyn, Barbara L. Webster, Cricket Rothrum, Christa Beeson and Jeff Charvat. Wikipedia dates a “VGA enhanced version” to 1989; no DOS build or document that early turned up for this file.

Still a book test

The Fodor's USA quiz survived the rebuild. Per the manual, each promotion waits on a Qualification Quiz answered from the guide: three tries, and a miss means solving another case before the retake. The manual calls this “off disk copy protection”. In archive.org's v2.3 set the questions sit in a plain-text file, QUESTION.ASK: 23 of them, in two flavours, “What is the last bold-faced word at the bottom of page 454?” and “Which state is featured on page 141?” The ladder they guard has eleven rungs in the executable, Gumshoe to Super Sleuth. More on the habit at the reference book as a required move.