Number Train compatibility problem
Matthew Phillips
Software, which came on a triple-format CD. While away over Christmas we
tried it on grandad's Windows 98 PC and it worked fine, and the recipient
enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately, coming back to our exclusively RISC OS
and Linux house, we have so far been unable to get it to install on any of
our RISC OS kit and we have a very disappointed child.
Quick question, if you don't want to read the detail:
Does anyone have Number Train (or the similar Number Plane) working OK with
RISC OS 4 on a StrongARM Risc PC?
Further detail, in case anyone can help:
The CD autoran when inserted into the PC. When I popped it into our Risc
PC's CD drive, I found there was a directory called Acorn (well, actually
ACORN, as all filenames were in capitals and no longer than 8.3 characters
long).
Inside was
_FONTS
_INSTALL
_NUMTRAI
and opening these it became clear that they were meant to be application
directories. All the files were identified as filetype Data rather than what
they should have been.
I copied everything to the hard disc and set the filetypes appropriately
(various Obey files, and Absolute for the !RunImage, a utility, sprites,
templates, and a BASIC file also). I also had to rename some of the files to
deal with the fact that they had been truncated.
Running !Install worked, and I was able to drag the application from the
installer window to where I wanted to put it. The application neverthelesss
refers to the CD for the data for the application, which is in the root of
the CD in a directory called DATA, and is apparently shared with the PC
version. This is a protection measure and is correct behaviour according to
the manual.
Unfortunately, when running the !NumTrain application, it quits with the
error:
Message from PlayBook
Not enough memory for template load - increase wimpslot
The wimpslot is set to 640K in the !Run file. Increasing it to 6400K makes
no difference (the manual says that it runs on Acorn systems with 4MB RAM).
I wondered whether the problem was RISC OS 4. We had RISC OS 3.71 in the
Risc PC originally, but upgraded to RISC OS 4 many years ago, and I do not
fancy swapping the ROMs back just for testing.
We have also tried Number Train using the Iyonix (RISC OS 5.13), where
Aemulor is required to get anywhere, and on RPCEmu running under Ubuntu.
With RPCEmu we tried StrongARM and ARM710 processors. We tried dropping the
RAM to 8MB from 32MB but it made no difference.
The error has been the same in all cases.
Number Train was announced as new in Archive in vol. 13 issue 4, which was
about the same time that Castle started supplying Risc PCs with RISC OS 4
installed, so you would have thought it stood a chance of working. At least
we can be fairly sure it's not a StrongARM issue.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to get it working? I will try
contacting Sherston Software next week, but I do not hold out much hope:
clearly the way they manufacture tha CDs has changed at some point given the
fact that the Acorn-specific information has disappeared from the CD. I
suspect all we ae likely to get is our money back, whereas our four-year-old
would dearly love the software to be working (it did look excellent).
If anyone can pass me files of the RO 3.71 ROMs to try in RPCEmu that might
help diagnose whether it is a RISC OS 4 issue specifically. I would rather
not have to take the Risc PC apart and swap ROMs at this point!
Thanks,
--
Matthew Phillips
Dundee
David
Matthew Phillips <mn...@sinenomine.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Our four-year-old has just been given a copy of Number Train from Sherston
> Software, which came on a triple-format CD. While away over Christmas we
> tried it on grandad's Windows 98 PC and it worked fine, and the recipient
> enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately, coming back to our exclusively RISC OS
> and Linux house, we have so far been unable to get it to install on any of
> our RISC OS kit and we have a very disappointed child.
We had the Acorn version which ran successfully on ROS 4.39 from the
server ... as I remember.
Contacting Sherston is the best bet.
Best wishes (and for 2010)
--
Dave Wisnia, Leeds, UK
Graeme
Matthew Phillips <mn...@sinenomine.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> It's now working fine, and our son is busy pairing up fandango frogs!
>
Kinky!
--
Graeme Wall
My genealogy website <www.greywall.demon.co.uk/genealogy/>