forums.jaspp.org.uk

We have a lot of games in a pending state, some of which can be released. Please select the ones you'd like to see release next.

Cannon Fodder was the previous winner and has now been released.

In light of Cannon Fodder being release this week, please re-vote.

Must admit, what I'm most looking forward to is a number of the games from 'The Fourth Dimension' and 'Eterna/Systeme'. I guess the relevant permissions there are somewhat more challenging?

richw wrote:Must admit, what I'm most looking forward to is a number of the games from 'The Fourth Dimension' and 'Eterna/Systeme'. I guess the relevant permissions there are somewhat more challenging?

The Fourth Dimension titles are somewhat in limbo, due to the sad loss of David Holden. I believe the "APDL" estate is in the hands of solicitors.

Eterna/Systeme we've not managed to track anyone down to seek approval. Actually, that's not strictly true, I've tried to contact Frederic Nespoulous via LinkedIn but not received a response. If anyone has a "paid" LinkedIn account and is willing to help, we'd probably get in touch with quite a few people.

Nova Fisher (Minerva) was another I've tried to contact via LinkedIn and not received a response.

I was in touch with Merlyn Kline (Minerva) a while ago. Maybe you could try contacting him: http://www.binary.co.uk/binary.html

Nebulus and Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 are working on the Pi in the next ADFFS release (2.48), so I'll get them ready for release. I need to test them both on RO3.7 ARM610 and StrongARM and in the case of Nebulus sort out the scans and convert the manual to a PDF, expect a Feb release.

davidb wrote:I was in touch with Merlyn Kline (Minerva) a while ago. Maybe you could try contacting him: http://www.binary.co.uk/binary.html

My brother has some fond memories of Thundermonk, and so we'd both like to see this released at some point -- as a very early Arc game, I seem to remember it had RISC OS 3 compatibility issues. Anyway, he tells me he contacted Merlyn in search of a copy, and got this response (back in 2009): "Well, I don't know if I can get a copy either! It's deep in our archive somewhere... You're welcome to make a copy if you want to give it to someone. Meanwhile I'll poke around in the dusty recesses of our stock cupboard and see what I can find." As far as I know this got no further.

morb wrote:My brother has some fond memories of Thundermonk, and so we'd both like to see this released at some point

I just tested this under the JIT, which immediately crashed. On further investigation I'd neglected to point R14 to BASIC's variable/entry table. Having fixed that its now running up to RO3.71 StrongARM, although pressing SHIFT causes an abort***, which I need to look into. This happens on RO3.11 as well, so could be a bug/incompatibility in their code.

Its still failing on RO5 though, I've added it to the list of games to analyse and get working.

morb wrote:I seem to remember it had RISC OS 3 compatibility issues

There are several issues with the loader, it does nasty things like alter your CMOS and write directly to a sector on the floppy. The Boot Script (F1037601) stops this to make it RO3 compatible.

I'll drop Merlyn Kline an eMail and ask if there's any possibility to release Minerva titles.

EDIT: *** The Abort was being cause by the boot check, which expects the commandline to be ThunBoot. I've now fixed it in the Boot Script.

There's also a possible bug in the protection code, that checks a region of memory hasn't changed...after it's just changed it. Although it could fail it on purpose and it overwrites the BASIC boot loader, so may be checking if PAGE!=&8F00. It doesn't seem to have an obvious affect on the game and I can't find any check that's done on it later in the game, so it may be something they left out of the game.