Can anyone make this great-looking game work?
 

http://www.apc-tcp.de/software/0025_demo.lha

Pinball Brain Damage is a fabulous-looking AGA pinball game. Unfortunately, after two hideously gruelling days getting the thing installed to my WinUAE hard drive, it won't play. The game boots up, runs, and goes through all the menu screens, but when it comes to actually starting a table, the "Game Start" key (supposedly Return) does nothing. The key works fine in the menus, it just won't start the game. I'd wondered if it was maybe some cunning anti-piracy thing which was falling foul of the emu, but the official demo download from the game's own website (which is what's linked above) suffers from the same issue.

There's a WHDLoad file for the game here:

http://www.whdload.de/games/PinballBrainDamage.html

...but it makes no mention of fixing this problem, and the merest glance at the documentation for setting up WHDLoad brings me out in a cold sweat, so I don't especially fancy another frustrating, wasted day of my life getting to grips with it if it's not even going to help. (It seems unlikely that WHDLoad would help, because it's for games that weren't meant to run from HD at all. Pinball BD will ONLY run from HD - the demo is hard-disk files, not ADFs.)

Does anyone know how to get this game actually playing? Is it even possible on emulator?

????

Installing WHDLoad using the included installer is a painless procedure.
Same goes for installing a game to work with WHDLoad.

WHDload really is simple to install! It's just a matter of double clicking an install icon and choosing a few install dirs. Piece of piss!

And as for installing the games, Most whdload games can be found fully installed already, you just need to unpack them and play! :xmas

If you need any games in specific for whdload just give us a shout. It really is really straight really forward really.

Hngh. Like I said, it seems very unlikely that WHDLoad will be any help in this situation anyway, since Pinball Brain Damage was designed exclusively to work from hard drive. Can someone else just try the demo and see if they can get it working?

You've made one very simple mistake, the key to start the game is enter, and enter isn't the return key, it's the one on the keypad.

Well, duh. I did try both of those. Along with every other key on the keyboard, Shifted, Alt-ed, CTRL-ed and everything else I could think of.

I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't tried it myself, and it worked with no problem, no fancy configs, no fancy setups.

Had a quick go. After some prodding and poking, I got it to start loading. It promply locked up and screwed WinUAE's boot hard drive file. No more hard disk for me, then.

After booting from a Workbench disk image, I got nothing but sound, so I upgraded to the latest WinUAE. Excitingly, I then got to sit through 10 minutes of introductory pictures because there's no option to skip them. Once I finally get to the menu screens, the only key that does anything at all is the Escape key. This dumps me back at the CLI prompt.

I'd guess that it's the emulator at fault, though this is probably because the game is badly written.

What are your settings? And is that the latest WinUAE or an older one?

latest winuae, settings typical to a standard a1200 with just a bit of extra fastmem
if the problem starting it is from the first menu then you use the mouse for that not the keyboard

Actually, problem solved (I'd already tried starting it with the mouse button after noticing it worked for the menus, but without success).

Turns out what I needed to do was set Port 0 to "Windows Mouse" and Port 1 to "Mouse*". Otherwise the settings screw with various keys.

Don't you love it when programmers make their interfaces consistent and user-friendly?