Black Angel (1993) (The Fourth Dimension)

[JonAbbott]

Black Angel (1993) (The Fourth Dimension) ID: 10043 Version: 16-02-1993 Developer: Gordon J. Key Genre: 3D; Space; Adventure; Shooter RAM: 1024 CPU compatibility: ARM2 ARM250 ARM3 ARM610 ARM700 ARM710 ARM7500 StrongARM ARMv5+ OS compatibility: 3.11 3.5x 3.6x 3.7x 4.x 5.x Legal info: Distribution rights granted to JASPP by Gordon Key (as author) and David Bradforth (on behalf of APDL) Download full archive: (4.7mb) Download individual floppies: Game info To run the game use "Boot floppy" from the ADFFS Filer. Synopsis The Universe is old, very old, and your fourth generation galaxy is dying. Chaos Rules With Ultimate Power. There are no laws save those that nature imposes and any that you choose to impose upon yourself. Evidence has been uncovered of an ancient civilization which may have inhabited a third generation galaxy. A civilisation which seems to have beaten nature's limits of time and motion. A civilisation which could travel faster than light. A civilization which may have outlived the death of its mother galaxy and which may even have had the power to leave the Universe itself. Of course very few people believe what can be read in the five Billion year old religious scripts. They choose to believe that the Star Gates are a natural phenomenon, they choose to become extinct. The objective of the game is to seek out and find the many parts to the key to the Star Gates, with which you should be able to escape from your dying galaxy to begin life again in a better place. This key, which is actually a huge computer program, has been split into a multitude of small pieces and hidden throughout the galaxy inside eight dimensional caskets. You have been given the clue to the location of the first of the caskets which lies in the star system of Atisco.

Screenshots

Gameplay

[salsaaaa]

Hello,

I am unable to get this game to run. it crashes out after an error message about memory/loading (I will get a screenshot shortly and edit in shortly)

edit: well maybe not shortly as my pi appears to have display issues.

I am using RISC OS Direct on a Raspberry Pi 400. It's basically a fresh image.

[JonAbbott]

I am unable to get this game to run. ... I am using RISC OS Direct on a Raspberry Pi 400.

If you look at the OS compatibility in the OP, you'll note this game doesn't work under RISCOS 5 with ADFFS - red means it's incompatible, green means it's made compatible by ADFFS and black means it's natively compatible.

To play it on your Pi, you'll need to run it inside an emulator such as ArcEm.

ADFFS can't reliably support any Wimp based games at the moment, it's something I've been working on for a few years, planned for ADFFS 3.0. There's two main issues, firstly ADFFS can't task-switch the 26-bit pseudo-VM into memory when an IRQ or 26bit Module call occurs. Secondly the OS doesn't preserve memory page flags when task-switching.

I meant to put checks in the script files to prevent Wimp based games from running under RISCOS 5 but haven't yet.

[salsaaaa]

Ahhhh ok got it. Appreciate the feedback, thank you!

[salsaaaa]

So, I got this game working on RO Direct/Pi, at least I think I did?

When I run the installer in ArcEm (Acorn_26bit in that RODirect distribution), I can't get to ADFFS when it prompts for Disc 2 because it locks the pointer in the "Please Insert Disc 2" pop-up. But, upon exiting and reloading, I find it appears to be installed and working?

Unsure if it's actually working or waiting to crash out at some point, but thus far... error free.

[JonAbbott]

I can't get to ADFFS when it prompts for Disc 2 because it locks the pointer in the "Please Insert Disc 2" pop-up

Press CTRL+SHIFT+F2 to switch to disk 2 - just make sure the floppy image filenames are the same, with the last digit being the disk no.

[salsaaaa]

Hmmm, tried this but it didn't seem to do anything.

I have the two floppy images in the directory with the ArcEm executable, FloppyImage0 and FloppyImage1. Hitting that key combination does not seem to do anything. That key combination is for ArcEm I'm assuming?

[JonAbbott]

You've named them incorrectly, as detailed in the documentation and in my post above, the last digit is the floppy disk no: FloppyImage1, FloppyImage2

[salsaaaa]

Got it! So my confusion was on the ArcEm/ADFFS split, I was reading the ArcEm documentation too which has you put the floppy images in the executable for that as well, but on that, it starts at FloppyImage0 (at least according to v1.00 documentation).

Anyways, its working fine now. Thank you so much.