Thexder II: Firehawk won't accept any passwords

[goatmeal]

Decided to play Firehawk this evening, but I'm running into an odd problem: the game will not accept any of the passwords it's requesting.

It's not a issue of me not choosing the correct word, or a confusion as to whether a black space _IS_ considered a "line" or a subtitle _IS_NOT_ considered a "line." One of the numerous attempts was the first line of a bunch of text (no vertical spaces, no subtitles): Pg 37, Line 1, Word 4. No ambiguity there, but it STILL did not accept the word after I hit <Enter>, resulting in the following text box:

SORRY, BUT YOUR RESPONSE
WAS NOT CORRECT. THE GAME
WILL NOW QUIT.

I'm running Thexder II: Firehawk version 2.0 in DOSBox 0.74-3 on a Windows 7, installed from my original diskette(s) purchased in the early '90s. I've tried it on a slow 286 setting, a fast Pentium setting, in straight DOSBox, in DOSBox Enhanced Community Edition r4275 (for pixel perfection) -- nothing.

I could have sworn it worked when I set up DOSBox 0.74 years ago... Any ideas?

(Just tried again -- Pg 6, Line 1, Word 1 -- what could be more obvious, right? -- but nothing.)

[notbobsmith]

I just gave it a try with a couple of passwords and didn't have any problems. Can you provide an example? What the game asks for and the word that you entered? I can then compare it to my manual.

[goatmeal]

I just gave it a try with a couple of passwords and didn't have any problems. Can you provide an example? What the game asks for and the word that you entered? I can then compare it to my manual.

Thank you for the reply; I'll give you some examples in a PM when I get home tonight. (Don't want to be accused of releasing copy protection info out into the wild...)

Last night I also tried with Caps Lock on and off, and using / not using the Shift Key -- I didn't think it would make a difference since the game automatically displays Capital letters, regardless of the keyboard input. No matter what, still no go...

[goatmeal]

I figured out the problem: On the main menu screen, not only can you use <Enter> to advance your selection, but you can also use the <Space Bar>.

Having recently played Zeliard, I used the Space Bar here to advance to the next menu, too, instead of using the Enter key. However, when you select "Start" and the Copy Protection comes up, using the Space Bar inserts 1 space to the start of your answer -- likely due to keyboard input buffering -- which is why my answers kept failing.

Also, the block cursor on the answer line isn't aligned with any of the text above it, so I didn't notice that this unwanted space character -- a non-displaying glyph -- was being added to the beginning of my answer.