The game I played for hours on the Apple ][+ was "FantasyLand 2041". It came on six double sided disks, and I was bummed to find out after quite a lot of game time that disk six was corrupted. I then found out many years later that it wasn't corrupted, the game wasn't ever finished. I then further discovered that John Bell, who produced that and other popular games (Sand of Mars, Beneath the Pyramids, House of Usher), is utterly batty and has written a few "the government is hiding UFOs from us" books.

It was actually mostly written in assembly, but used Pascal calling conventions and structure layouts since that was expected to be the primary language for application developers. As it had been for Lisa, as it was for “large” applications on Apple II, and as was the case for much of the rest of the microcomputer and minicomputer industry and even the nascent workstation industry (eg Apollo).

It was the Lisa system software that was mostly implemented in Pascal and some blamed this for its largeness and its performance. Compilers and linkers weren’t great back then; most compiler code generation was pretty rigid, and most linkers didn’t even coalesce identical string literals across compilation unit boundaries!

Lisa Workshop C introduced the “pascal” keyword for function declarations and definitions to indicate they used Pascal calling conventions, and otherwise followed Lisa Pascal structure layout rules, so as to minimize the overhead of interoperating with the OS. (I’m not sure whether it introduced the “\p” Pascal string literal convention too or if that came later with Stanford or THINK Lightspeed C.)

The FSSpec calls added in System 7 are mostly new interfaces to existing File Manager functionality. There's an actual high-level `OpenDF()` call, which is like `FSOpen()` except that it won't try to open a driver when the name begins with `.`.

Some applications call `OpenDF()` without checking its availability, but fall back to `FSOpen()` or equivalent if `OpenDF()` returns `paramErr`, which is what the parent is witnessing. See `68k/modules/ams-fs/Files.cc` in the `metamage_1` repo.

If the error message is confusing people, maybe it's time to implement `OpenDF()` for real.

Strange it errors out on given that I assume the thing does run elsewhere. The X11 version sometimes shows the opening screen but any attempt at interaction leads to the mentioned error. The VLC version shows the error directly.