On 8 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:
> Am Sat, 07 Aug 2021 19:36:46 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:
> > Quick summary: Using Aemulor Ultimate, I can run Frog-knows (the
> > original RISC OS port of Angband), Umoria (the predecessor of Angband),
> > Cthangband, Discband, Psiband, Kamband and Sangband. The very obvious
> > thing all these have in common is that they were all ported by Musus
> > Umbra on or before the year 2000. However Kangband (ported 1999) won't
> > run, and Angband 2.9.3 (ported 2001) will.
> >
> > Vanilla Angband 2.9.3 works. Vanilla Angband 3.0.9 doesn't.
> >
[snip]
>
> I never get the point why there are so many different types of this
> game ... Sangband, Kamband, Zangband and many more.
Mainly because lots of people wanted to create their own improved
version of the game to fix what they saw as flaws in the original (a lot
of the early variants try to rebalance the combat system) and/or to add
new features. Many variants have new character races. One branch
(Zangband/Cthangband/Kangband) developed a wilderness and/or multiple
towns above ground in addition to the traditional dungeon corridors.
Some variants tried to implement a skill system where you improved
specific skills by practising them or by choosing to allocate points to
them, rather than all skills improving automatically as the player
increased in level. Some gave the player the ability to set traps for
monsters as well as vice versa. Several implemented 'quests' in various
different ways, e.g. a level where you have to find and kill a certain
number of a certain monster type before you can get the quest reward, or
a special dungeon entrance with extra-small levels and out-of-depth
monsters.
Psiband tried to introduce psionics into the game by creating a
psionicist class and giving monsters psionic attacks which all player
classes had to deal with. Discband literally just changed the names of
things in the data files so that, for example, the traditional Scroll of
Remove Curse becomes Cutangle's Curse Removal and you get potions of
Ankh Water and Klatchian Coffee.
Quickband was an ingenious variant designed for those times when you
don't feel like investing several weeks/months in repetitive farming for
artifacts in an attempt to complete 100 levels of Angband; it only
provides 12 dungeon levels, actively encourages the player to dive fast,
implements a steeper progression curve, and does some major rebalancing
in order to make this compressed difficulty format work and eliminate
the large amounts of 'scumming' inherent in standard Angband play.
(This is one of the few variants where it would be nice to have a fresh
RISC OS port of the later versions, since it went on being tweaked for
balance until v2.06 of 2012, and we only had a port of v1.05 from 2008.)
NPPAngband is literally 'No Pet Peeves Angband'; Oangband is
'Opinionated Angband'. I think a lot of the elements they introduced,
such as more varied dungeon layout, improved monster AI and better
inventory control, ended up being merged back into vanilla Angband in
later years.
My favourites were Cthangband, and I'm delighted to find that this one
is still playable (admittedly mainly because it's a very old port which
was supposed to have been superseded by sCthband and hence didn't get
recompiled with the 'new' RISC OS front-end that seems to have broken
things for more recent computers), Steamband, which is the one I was
playing most recently, and for a long time Frog-knows, which was somehow
more challenging and less bland than the more modern versions of the
'vanilla' game. I think I might find it a bit limiting now, though.
I regret the loss of Eyangband, Steamband and Zangband (although the
gameplay of that one has been partially preserved in the form of
Discband); I'm sneakily glad that Kamband is still working, although it
is and always has been horribly broken and unbalanced and only fit for
being silly with. :-p
I don't really care much about the fate of Kangband, CaTHband or
Unangband. It would be nice to have Quickband to fill those more
serious Kamband moments, when you want to progress very rapidly through
the levels without the inevitable horribly messy death and/or Monty Haul
scenario.
I never really got into Sangband, as the skills-based system is too
non-intuitive (in my view Steamband implements - and documents! - the
idea of a skill tree much better), but it's nice to have it around. I
probably ought to care more about NPPAngband and OAngband, both of which
were serious, longterm, respected and stable variants which forked off
multiple developments in their turn, but because they were relatively
'normal' I don't remember much about them....
>
> But eventually it could be a good idea to bring them back to the
> internet, eventually at iconbar or another place where people will be
> able to find and download them.
It would be nice to have a repository of RISC OS Angband versions and
variants in order to provide a central resource, and the Iconbar would
be a logical place, given that it already has an Angband section dating
back to Musus Umbra's day:
https://www.iconbar.com/Angband_support_-_Introduction/news973.html
I'm happy to provide the various compiled versions I have, although none
of them appear to be 32-bit safe, or at least not ARMX6-safe. I
suspect that it would be hard to locate source code for most of them,
but it would be very nice to be able to recompile at least some of them
so that they work without Aemulor - or, indeed, work *with* Aemulor!
And one really ought to have the base game (Vanilla Angband) working for
comparison, and it's currently one of the ones that doesn't.
Neither Antony nor Andrew Sidwell seem to have been active on the
Iconbar for a long time:
https://www.iconbar.com/forums/profile.php?username=ajps
https://www.iconbar.com/forums/profile.php?username=takkaria
>
>
> Some of the errors really seem to bes very simple - eventually sometimes
> the files only need to be in existence but aren't there. Eventually they
> have been there - but were lost in the ZIP files if they had 0 bytes
> length.
In this case the files demonstrably *are* there (the code is reporting
the content of the 'error line'), but are failing to be interpreted
properly, presumably due to something going wrong in the part of the
source code that ought to be parsing them....
> Others are eventually not found because of typos in the source code.
I had a look at Musus Umbra's BASIC !Runband file, which appears in all
the variants, and it does indeed contain, as I had suspected, the
assumption
IF os_version%>&A7 THEN os_version%=400
But this isn't the problem, because all the variants contain this file,
including the ones which work correctly.
>
>
> I've tried to find some of the websites You mentioned - wich are all
> gone. Many of them seems to be gone forever. But one of the main sites
> tries to stand the test of times on
>
>
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927013626/http://rephial.org/
> release/3.0.5
>
> There are some other versions and times too. I used this one because it
> seems to be one of the relevant Ports to RISC OS - and it comes with its
> sources - and all files found their way to archive and are downloadable.
> At least there is a ReadMe File wich is signed by Anthony - hope this is
> a sign of qualitiy, You cited an Anthony in Your posts, see above.
That version doesn't run for me - does it run for you? 3.0.3 doesn't
work for me either, but 3.0.0 does, and in fact without requiring
Aemulor... which incidentally proves that it's not the introduction of
Lua scripting for the 3.0.x branch that is causing the problem, nor the
v3.0.0 comment "replaced the old Acorn (RISC OS) code with a newer
version"!
It looks as if version 3.0.9, which is the latest (non-working) one I
have, was the final release to include RISC OS; the release notes for
version 3.2.0 include the statement "Remove RISC OS port".
The actual 'terrain.txt' file to which version 3.0.9 is objecting
appears to be identical to the one which works quite happily in version
3.0.0. :-(
--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.