Iron Seed is a science-fiction DOS game from 1994, which was both developed and published by Channel 7. Gameplay is real-time, featuring trading, diplomacy, and strategy. This version has been changed to make it possible to compile it with the freepascal compiler under Linux.
Termination of IronSeed due to a bug can result in the situation where attempting to run IronSeed again will result in an immediate out of memory error, and the termination of IronSeed again. Waiting a reasonable amount of time can allow IronSeed to be run again, but this should really not be necessary.
Further investigation shows that running any of the non-core executables will immediately free whatever is causing the problem. This suggests a possible thread problem, possibly a fork, or zombie.
IronSeed currently requires a soundcard to play the game. Now while the game is very reliant on sound to convey its atmosphere, I would still like the option to play the game without sound at all. There are also practical reasons for having this, in that the laptop used for testing this build has recently had its sound chips die on it.
It's an odd bug I spotted today, when selecting the save position and changing the name, the save slot name cannot be created with capital letters. It produces numbers in their place instead, suggesting this is an ASCII lookup bug.
Currently researching the graphics file format, and have an idea it was possibly produced using the Hijaak Graphics Suite. There are, however, several other candidates including Corel products. As all of this concerns systems around the 1990's things are going to be very difficult.
If I find a working copy of the graphics editor for the format used in IronSeed, I really think it will be prudent to update the graphics file format support to something much more modern and open. Especially to save future coders serious grief.