Quote:
Originally Posted by DamienD
I've renamed the disk to " Ball v1.0 (1990)(Mackey, Ed - Mackey, Al)(PD).adf" and reuploaded to The Zone!  |
Unfortunately, your ADF didn't work on my A500/1MB machine Damien. It starts to boot and then craps out to CLI with an error (some sort of LoadWB error IIRC). I gather your ADF boots to a Workbench screen and then the game must be launched from the game directory??
Anyway, I needed to knock up a HOL entry last night for
Ball and use my A500 to take screenshots with the Action Replay.....so I quickly adapted your ADF to autoboot straight into the game and included decrunched game exec + doc files since there was plenty of space on the disk. It tested fine on both my A500 and A1200/030. In the Zone for anyone interested....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt_H
And, if possible, I would also note that the disk is unofficial and/or newly created. The disk/archive from Ed Mackey that was sent to CAM has yet to turn up.
There was source code in the CAM version, but no graphics or audio files to complete a build. Not sure yet if those were omitted from CAM of if they were never distributed in the first place.
Also, the CAM and Assassins releases were crunched with PowerPacker. I recently found just the Ball executable on an old hard drive - which I suspect came from that still-missing original archive via a BBS - and it was not crunched. I didn't know how to decrunch things myself back then, so that's probably how it was distributed.
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Chances are Matt that CAM probably sourced their version of
Ball from a BBS rather than directly from the Mackey brothers, so they may not have received the original decrunched archive (if that was, indeed, how it was distributed by the Mackey brothers when they released it into the public domain). As you probably know, a lot of PD games/utils on the North American BBS's were bundled (often in crunched form) on to compilation disks Fred Fish style back then.
As for the source code, my guess is that the graphics and audio files weren't distributed if the Mackey brothers had immediate plans to expand on
Ball by developing shareware versions of it that were released as
MegaBall a year later. We'll probably never know unless someone in your neck of the woods unearths some crusty old disk or hard drive/backup with the original PD release on it.