Date   : Wed, 16 Aug 2000 20:44:14 +0200
From   : Isabel Cisternas & Robert Schmidt <rschmidt@...>
Subject: Re: Getting the Acornsoft Adventures to run

Hi Patrick,

Castle of Riddles is a tape game.  It can be hard to get the downloading
right, so my second attempt at loading a game, after trying, say, Acorn
DFS in BeebEm, is to try an "E00" DFS, i.e. a DFS residing in sideways
ROM which leaves PAGE = &E00. (See:
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/faq.shtml#roms)

Both versions of Castle of Riddles in the TBL! archive work with this
technique.  The same goes for Philosopher's Quest, except 
PhilosophersQuest-V2.zip which is missing a file "INIT" - I'll check it
up.

Kingdom of Hamil (from the archive) comes with a downloading loader,
which fails with the E00 ROM.  Just CHAIN "HAMIL" instead.

Gateway to Karos has been hacked to work with a Watford DFS (only).

Acheton works (*RUN ACHETON).

Are you referring to LordOfTheRings-TD.zip?  Check the README file.

With LordOfTheRingsGame1.zip, I had no problems getting at least
"Part1A" to run.  I seem to recall running each of the other parts
earlier.

I hope this helps!  Good luck!

robert



Patrick Warner wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I've been sucscribing to this newsgroup for some time but never asked any
quesitons before.
> 
> I am trying to run some old adventure games on both PCBBC and BEEBEM and
having trouble getting them to run.  I have hardly used my BBC computer since
about 15 years ago so I'm a bit rusty!!!
> 
> Specifically:
> Castle of Riddles - I downloaded this from a link on "The BBC Lives" site. 
 I have followed the instructions for converting this into a disk image 
using Diskmgr.com, but I can't find any way to run it.  I have tried also
following the instructions on "The BBC Lives" faq about "Downloading" the
memory page to various addresses, but this didn't seem to work either.
> 
> Lord of the Rings:
> Again, I have converted this to a disk image and a !BOOT file was created 
but it will not autoboot, nor can I find any way to run it after trying all
the hints on the FAQ.  When I try to run the "v.lord" program directly  get
a garbled colours all over the screen and then it either crashes or sometimes
says "bad program".
> 
> In both cases I tried with both PCBBC and Beebem with the same results
so I suspect it's something I'm doing wrong.
> 
> My question is, am I missing some obvious step that is not documented.
 If not, does anyone know specific tricks to get these to run?
> 
> Thanks
> Patrick.