Unofficial / Hack categorisation of Dr Who And The Mines Of Terror

[garfield]

Correct me if I'm wrong... but there was only 3 official releases of Micro Power''s "Dr Who And The Mines Of Terror" :

1. The BBC B version commercially released on cassette tape and accompanying 16K EPROM
2. The BBC B version commercially released on floppy diskette and accompanying 16K EPROM
3. The B+ / Master version commercially released on floppy diskette only. *
( * presumably the floppy diskette release for the B+ / Master only needed 12K of sideways RAM, given the maximum amount of sideways ram available on the lowest spec B+64K machine. )

I was looking on bbcmicro.co.uk and there appears to be a unofficial hack that munges together a sideways RAM requirement for the BBC B, such that the "physical" rom is not needed (and instead a soft copy is loaded from diskette). Entry in question is: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=473

Since this is an unofficial hack (albeit useful)... can we mark this Mines Of Terror unoffical release as such?

( By way of example, there are entries ( such as a Chuckie Egg hack ) that do this correctly, and don't present a false history of affairs. See image below. )

Thanks !

[lurkio]

... can we mark this Mines Of Terror unoffical release as such?

They're all unofficial releases! (Or many of them are, anyway.)

The ethos of the Complete BBC Micro Games Archive at bbcmicro.co.uk is explained on the About page:

We strive for ease of use rather than the exact preservation of original releases. Games on tape have been transferred to disc-images so that they will load quickly. And changes have been made to enhance usability ... Any major changes have been noted on a per-game basis ... Mick has enhanced the games by fixing bugs, adding user-friendly instructions (taken from cassette inlays or other authentic sources), and ensuring that the games are compatible with a range of emulators as well as real Acorn hardware.

So hopefully that makes it clear that the site doesn't claim to host authentic, byte-for-byte original copies of games.

Where we've added the "[hack]" tag we've done so to indicate that the actual gameplay -- or features, or appearance, or other functionality -- of the game has been substantively altered, e.g. by creating new levels, or new colour schemes, etc.

[vanekp]

Dr Who won't run with a copy of the ROM in a ram socket as it checks that it can't write to the ROM/RAM memory if it does the loading fails on the unmodified version so guess the modifications are to circumvent the copy protection.

[garfield]

We strive for ease of use rather than the exact preservation of original releases. Games on tape have been transferred to disc-images so that they will load quickly. And changes have been made to enhance usability ... Any major changes have been noted on a per-game basis ... Mick has enhanced the games by fixing bugs, adding user-friendly instructions (taken from cassette inlays or other authentic sources), and ensuring that the games are compatible with a range of emulators as well as real Acorn hardware.

Understood.