Pandora’s Box and Black Angel

[Longbridge158]

Hello

I’ve been using ADFFS for a while now, mostly with the games downloaded using !PackMan.

I recently tried to image some of my 4D games, with the hope to play them on my Pi. So far I’ve imaged Pandora’s Box and Black Angel, I now have questions on both…

Firstly I tried Pandora’s Box, successfully imaged using the instructions on the forums and it runs on the Pi. My question here is about saving, I created a blank ADFS disc — I named the disc F1027403 — when I save within the game, I am able to ‘insert’ the blank disc and the game goes through the process of saving, but nothing is written to the disc. I have tried quitting the game and using flush but still nothing. Am I missing something? Or would this behaviour be expected?

Now for Black Angel, again successfully imaged but when I try and run using boot floppy, I get booted to the ShellCLI with a error from ADFFS saying reboot attempted. Doubling clicking on !BlackAngl I get application has gone wrong and then ‘Module ReadDisc is not 32-bit compatible’ is this expected on a Pi?

Any help / suggestions appreciated…

[JonAbbott]

I created a blank ADFS disc — I named the disc F1027403 — when I save within the game, I am able to ‘insert’ the blank disc and the game goes through the process of saving, but nothing is written to the disc. I have tried quitting the game and using flush but still nothing. Am I missing something? Or would this behaviour be expected?

That should work, I'll test with my copy just in case I've introduced a bug.

Black Angel, again successfully imaged but when I try and run using boot floppy, I get booted to the ShellCLI with a error from ADFFS saying reboot attempted.

The error message is where the disc protection failed and it attempted to reboot the machine.

I suspect you have a different version of the game to the one I used to create the recording file with. In the game folder will be a filename that's a date, let me know what the date is please.

EDIT: Odd, if I flush after launching Pandora's Box, it doesn't work. It works okay otherwise - I'll investigate.
Is the version file in Black Angel 16-02-1993?

EDIT2: The flush issue in my case was the path, so if you're using a script to launch Pandora's Box, check you've put an explicit path on the initial ADFMount command. Alternatively, manually drag the floppy back via the Save as dialogue.

I will however look at coding the auto-flushing so it saves the floppy back when switching floppies, or periodically when changes are made to an ADF.

[Longbridge158]

Thank Jon

Is the version file in Black Angel 16-02-1993?

I’ve checked and my version is 23-11-1992, which would explain it. They must have released a bug fix as I do seem to recall never being able to complete the game as one of the caskets was missing, this was quite far into the game so frustrating!

EDIT2: The flush issue in my case was the path, so if you're using a script to launch Pandora's Box, check you've put an explicit path on the initial ADFMount command. Alternatively, manually drag the floppy back via the Save as dialogue.

I’m not using a script to launch but manually dragging the floppy back using Save as worked

David

[JonAbbott]

I’m not using a script to launch

That's odd then as if you can swap between floppies within the game okay, it should be able to Flush as it already knows the path. A quick check would be to see if you can still switch floppies once you quit the game. It's also possible there was a bug that I've subsequently fixed - I'll check my change notes.

Once you've replied to my email, we can get you testing the beta version of ADFFS where I've added auto-flushing when floppies are swapped.
That should make the experience for Pandora's Box a lot better as it will save the floppy image when you swap back to disc 2 after saving.

[JonAbbott]

I’ve checked and my version is 23-11-1992, which would explain it.

The only difference between the two copies is in !RunImage2, other than that they appear to be identical down to the location of the files on the disk and the disc protection.

Your image of disc 1 is missing the protection sectors at the end of the disc. It looks like it wasn't imaged using the correct recording file and was imaged using the ADFFS 800K (E) recording file. Disc 2 was also imaged using the wrong recording, it appears to have used the disc 1 recording file, instead of disc 2.

Try reimaging both floppies again, confirming the recording file shows as F1004301 for disc 1 and F1004302 for disc 2.

[Longbridge158]

Ah — sorry for delay in replying.

That will teach me to try and do more than one thing at a time. I’ll re-image using the correct recording and see what happens.