How does ADFFS make my game work?

[segasonic]

I have a hard drive installed game, and when I run it my hard drives disappear. I guess it's unplugging the ZIDEFS module or something. In any case the game doesn't work.

If I run ADFFS first, this doesn't happen and the game works perfectly.

What magic is ADFFS doing there? The game isn't a JFD or floppy image, and doesn't have an ADFFS boot script in there.

I'm just curious, as well as happy that I can play my game! ADFFS and !JoyKeys make everything easy.

[JonAbbott]

What magic is ADFFS doing there?

ADFFS protects itself and other dependency Modules:

Code: Select all

SharedCLibrary
ZLib
CallASWI
ADFFS
MemAlloc
SoundDMA (on RISC OS 3.5+)
ADFS
FileCore%BASE
FileCore%ADFS
FileSwitch
MessageTrans
Messages
ResourceFS
UtilityModule
Debugger

and !JoyKeys make everything easy.

ADFFS should natively add Joystick support to quite a lot of games, if you were to to use *ADFBootFloppy Fxx in their !Run where they're HD installed. I'm not sure if anyone has tested it on RISC OS 3.1x though - it has been tested on the Pi through.

I don't recall if I'm loading JoyMod in all the games it adds support, or if its relying on the user to pre-load a suitable Joystick Module.

[segasonic]

Thanks Jon, that's great. I didn’t know it could make games work that aren't floppy images or packages. I haven't tried the boot script, I'm not sure it would work as I don't know if it's a cracked copy of some sort. I can give it a go later.

I read the docs and got the impression that the ADFFS joystick support was for USB controllers on modern hardware, have I got the wrong end of the (joy)stick?
I'm running on an A3010 so I have the Atari compatible ports, OS 3.10 and UniBoot. Would be happy to test it to see if it works.

[JonAbbott]

Quoting the 2.74 release notes:

Joystick support is primarily aimed at USB based Joysticks under RISC OS 5, but has also been backported to RISC OS 3.x using the Acorn interface.

So provided the Joystick Module is enabled most games should work.

[segasonic]

Turns out it's a bit beyond my understanding, I've learned a lot over the last month but still a RISC OS amateur. Ballarena is on the list of games that the boot script adds joystick support to, but it doesn't work with mine. I'm guessing joymod isn't enabled.
Most of the stuff I want to play supports the Acorn interface anyway. For anything that doesn't I got a modded !JoyKeys from Stardot that saves the layout so I don't have to change it every time, which was a bit of a pain.