The int 13h calls take CHS (cylinder, head, sector) addressing. For games int 13h is typically only used for the floppy disk (where the publisher has full control of the disk layout). If used for a hard drive the game would definitely have to be aware of what file system the hard drive is using in order to avoid corrupting it (or reading the wrong data).

For a "pc booter" game, the "file" may not have a name at all, and technically may not be a "file", and the "file allocation table" may not say anything because it need not be present at all (its sectors can then instead be used for "real data"). In an optimized self-booting application, the entire application image will be a contiguous sequence of sectors. (I don't know if IBM PCs suffered from this, but on one platform I used I found using every other sector to be much faster because by the time the machine got done copying the data for sector #1, sector #2 was already partially under the head, so a read of sector #2 would have to wait for a full disk rotation which is damn slow for floppies, and going for sector #3 {#5, #7, etc.} instead was something like 10x faster.)

BIOS will happily boot a floppy disk that doesn't have any file system on it at all -- all the disk needs is for the first sector to be readable and have a "magic number" in it identifying it as a boot sector and the BIOS will just load that sector into memory and execute it. (That tiny piece of code is then responsible for loading/running the rest of the app.)

(CD ROM is a bit different -- there is a somewhat complex format for bootable CD ROMs that you have to follow, and IIRC the BIOS isn't limited to loading a single 512 byte sector like it is for floppies -- it will load your whole image for you.)

Yep.

Real big classic that always eluded me. Glad to see it here!

I'm too young to have heard about this game before, but it certainly seems right up my alley. Wishlisted.

Surely the Amiga version, not mentioned there. was full version too since it was far more capable a machine than the Atari.

you can't judge a person who lived 600 years ago by todays standards. the world back then was very brutal and that is the way people acted all over the world (with the unusual exception of the indians that columbus first met).

Thank you guys. I loved this game back when and I have been wanting to play it again for yearsssss. I really appreciate it.

I got the original when it first came out. One of the best games before CIVILIZATION,0 back then on the C64....back in a day when companies like Microprose used copy protection that went outside the official write area of the floppy drive on the C64 (which was always going out of alignment so games like PIRATES would never run, 7 CITIES ran flawlessly. Primitive by current standards it was a lot of fun. It took 20 minutes for the game to create a new map/game. It was worth it. I was thinking of it again just this week and wishing I could play it. Thanks, again, GOG.

See game, buy game. I'm off to the store :-)