Jill of the Jungle under Virtual PC

Ahh... Jill of the Jungle. This is one of those classic games of DOS gaming. Released by Epic Mega during their hey-day this game is a solid platformer - with you playing the role of 'Jill' an Amazonian woman who needs to get through all of the levels for some reason that I never particularly cared about.

Anyway - when running this game under Virtual PC you will soon hit a problem that plagues a number of games under Virtual PC. Sticky keys. By this I mean that randomly keys will appear to be 'stuck down' inside of the game - and can only be unstuck by hitting them again. Needless to say this is disastrous in a platform game like Jill of the Jungle - where a stuck key can send you needlessly running off the edge of a platform into certain death.

The reason for this problem is that some games handle the keyboard by constantly polling for the keyboard state - and if they do not have enough flexibility built into their polling routines they can miss the 'key up' message when Virtual PC sends it through. Thankfully there is an easy way around this issue. By running a DOS game under Windows 98 - Windows will actually handle the polling routine for us and ensure that keystrokes do not get lost.

Jill of the Jungle runs fine under Windows 98:

If you want to lose a couple of hours on this classic (as I just did) you can download it from here: https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/113

Cheers,
Ben