The Last Offence

[debaser]

Hi everyone,

I had an Acorn 3020 as a kid, and I am currently trying to set up and emulate as many of the old games I had from then as possible. One of these was a demo version of the game "The Last Offence", which was never released commercially in the end.

I somehow had a copy of this demo on a floppy disc, which I ripped to an ADL file. I then renamed this to .ADF to get my emulators to read it. Arculator and RCPEmu could not read it for some reason, but Virtual Acorn was able to do so, and I successfully ripped the files from the disc to my virtual hard drive. I then transferred the files to RCPEmu to try and play it.

However, I get the following error when I try playing:


This is where my knowledge of Acorn systems completely falls apart. If I open the file, I see this:


It seems to me as if the Run file has been renamed weirdly, so I remove that extension and change it to file type Module, but then I get this error instead:


It also said something about "Illegal Header" at one point, but I forgot how to replicate this. The actual file contents look like this:


Does anyone have any idea how this might be fixed?

P.S. I am happy to upload the contents of this disc if it is acceptable to do so on this forum. I have not done it already because I am not sure what your policy is on sharing demo versions of games which were never actually relased in full. I have not found any reference to this demo anywhere other than this forum in a list of "unreleased games".

[flibble]

Rename and retype as follows;

Remove all /txt off the end of files
Remove all /oby off the end of files and set type to obey

And please do upload it to this thread or the archive submissions forum

[IanJeffray]

That folder appears to be mostly viruses.
"Icon" - Icon virus
and, I think, ALL the RM files are the Extend virus.

[IanJeffray]

And please do upload it to this thread or the archive submissions forum

Please don't

[debaser]

Haha! I am not sure what to say about the viruses. VirtualAcorn did throw up a warning about it, but I assumed it was a false positive. I guess this means my computer was riddled with viruses as a kid, which is pretty impressive given the fact that I had no internet access. The machine worked perfectly, too.

Thanks for the advice on the renames - I did as you said, and it appeared to fix the issue - but now it is complaining about a file not being present, and it legitimately doesn't exist, so I guess this one is dead in the water. Such a shame; even for a demo I remember this one being really impressive for the time.

Fortunately my old copy of Small still works perfectly, so I guess I'll stick to playing that instead. Cheers

[IanJeffray]

Did you try reading the .ADF file within RISC OS, using !ADFFS ? You'd probably had more luck with that, and it wouldn't have messed the filetypes/names.

[danielj]

And please do upload it to this thread or the archive submissions forum

Please don't

Oh, please do.

[IanJeffray]

And please do upload it to this thread or the archive submissions forum

Please don't

Oh, please do.

You're encouraging people to distribute things known to be chock full of virus? Great.

[ccawley2011]

Here's an intact version of the demo:
- https://downloads.orpheusweb.co.uk/pub/ ... ffence.zip

It does require some minor modifications to work on non-ADFS drives (e.g. HostFS) - open !LO_Demo.Utility in a text editor, search for the "FNdisc_type" function and add the line "=0" just before the line "SYS "ADFS_DescribeDisc",spec$, disc_record%". This will break running from floppy discs, but otherwise works fine for me in Arculator. I can attach a modified version of that file if needed.

[danielj]

You're encouraging people to distribute things known to be chock full of virus? Great.

We can devirus it.

But it's a great learning experience

[debaser]

Did you try reading the .ADF file within RISC OS, using !ADFFS ? You'd probably had more luck with that, and it wouldn't have messed the filetypes/names.

Thanks a lot for this tip - it still didn't work for this demo (it does unzip correctly, but still complains of missing files) - but this gives me something to go on for the other discs I ripped which didn't work. It seems that this demo was meant to have a second disk, which I must've lost at some point.

Here's an intact version of the demo:
- https://downloads.orpheusweb.co.uk/pub/ ... ffence.zip

Amazing - thankyou so much for this! RCPEmu gave me a black screen upon running the game, but it works perfectly as you say in Arculator. The game is just as impressive as I remember, too - it runs really smoothly compared to some other games on the platform. It's a shame the full product was never released.

I have another question, but I wanted to avoid making another thread for it if possible: Is there a certain machine on Arculator which gives the best power and/or compatibility? I'm currently using the A5000 with all the bells and whistles, but I am left wondering if there is a better machine for emulating games with.

I've also uploaded that LastOffence disc if you do want to take a shot at cleaning it up - but it's established that it won't work regardless. I don't want it entering circulation, so it is a passworded zip and the password is "virus?"

EDIT: I decided against leaving the link here - message me if you want it!