Heroes Of the Lance & Dragons Of Flame working version

[SquawkBox]

The games :
Heroes Of the Lance (1988) (SSI) & its follow up Dragons Of Flame (1989) (SSI)

The issue :
None of the available versions of each of these games work on my 1 MB A500,
same with chip mem halved
Also tried HFE v3 (from corresponding IPF's) to no avail

Needless to say, between the two, HOTL is the more polished game, so that's the one which should gain first priority .

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by SquawkBox

The games :
Heroes Of the Lance (1988) (SSI) & its follow up Dragons Of Flame (1989) (SSI)

The issue :
None of the available versions of each of these games work on my 1 MB A500,
same with chip mem halved
Also tried HFE v3 (from corresponding IPF's) to no avail

Needless to say, between the two, HOTL is the more polished game, so that's the one which should gain first priority .

HFE v3 is not needed for those games, simply because they are AmigaDOS and using files. standard HFE or ADF are fine.

The problem lies elsewhere. Are you sure the ADF are fine ?
which crack version do you use ?

[SquawkBox]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

HFE v3 is not needed for those games, simply because they are AmigaDOS and using files. standard HFE or ADF are fine.

I shouldn't bother playing from original in such circumstances then ? What if I actually like it a lot when a game asks me to enter a manual password ? Joke aside, I am supposed to test every available version so yup, that includes the IPF(s) version(s) when one exists, am I not ? Concerning HFE v3 vs HFE v1 debate, one could argue that he who can do more can do less, but fair enough, I converted HOTL set of IPF's to HFE v1 format and tried again.

The problem lies elsewhere.

It lies in that strange habit which consists in firing up WinUAE to asses compatibility with the real thing maybe .

Are you sure the ADF are fine ?

You mean, like someone should take my hand to download stuff from the file server, unzip it, copy it over to a USB flash drive and press the buttons of my Gotek to load said ADF or HFE ? Anyway, I doubt you will bother checking if it computes or not, but here are the CRC32 of :

Dragons of Flame v1.0 (1989)(SSI)[cr Empire].adf 056DCCA9
Dragons of Flame v1.0 (1989)(SSI)[cr PNA].adf 56F2C547
Dragons of Flame v1.0 (1989)(SSI)[cr].adf B91A5703
DragonsOfFlame_ipf.hfe 7F9CD863
Heroes of the Lance v1.0 (1988)(SSI)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr Ackerlight].adf 86BA4608
Heroes of the Lance v1.0 (1988)(SSI)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr][h AHU].adf F91F34DD
HeroesOfTheLance_Disk1_ipf.hfe 60A0225B

which crack version do you use ?

There aren't heaps of cracked versions of any of these games, plz see above. To sum up my results, HOTL won't load no matter what, while Dragons Of Flame belongs to the list of games that crash with 1 MB chip, interestingly enough. Hence, it is another case of "floppy game that has (yet to be) been fixed to work with 1MB chip instead of slow RAM"
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=107842
Will post there subsequently. Back to my failed attempts at loading HOTL from my machine : Ackerlight version goes black screen, anonymously cracked version (the one modified by AHU) gurus, and HFE v1 version goes black screen. That happens with 1 MB chip AND with 0.5 MB chip (it's just a matter of flipping a metal switch located at the back of my machine before rebooting). And before you suggest to use a 1.2 KS, it's not an option actually, Agnus is not the default one. Most likely, it has been replaced by the seller to support 1 MB directly on the chip. In terms of compatibility, amounts to a customized A500+ of sorts if you wish. As a matter of fact, I could only choose between 1.3 and 3.1 KS if I had to (again, by using a metal switch, yup, I am the proud owner of a pretty versatile miggy).

[dlfrsilver]

Ok i did a simple test : Heroes of the Lance is a Kickstart v1.2 game. It crash on my A500 with KS1.3+512kb of ram.

For Dragons of flame, it possibly depends on the version you want to use. The Vision Factory crack is corrupted due to how they implemented their cracks. It's fucked up and useless.

Try Dragons of Flames PNA

[SquawkBox]

For those interested, here are the specs of my A500 according to WhichAmiga, first picture shows half meg ram config, second shows one meg ram config :

As you may see, it is the Fatter Agnus my machine is equipped with. Probably was fed with too much pudding from the Polish seller .

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

The Vision Factory crack is corrupted due to how they implemented their cracks.

Well, that's more or less what they do mention in their own cracktro, don't they ? But anyway the game loads after one enters 'armies' at manual password prompt. I am not saying it won't break later on but, on the surface at least, it seems to load just fine.

it possibly depends on the version you want to use.

Sorry no, try any version of the game on your A2000 you will notice it simply fails because of the presence of the 1 MB chip ram. Since ross has asked us to avoid multiple threads about games he might be interested in fixing to help those who are stuck with 1MB chip, may I kindly suggest further discussion about that very game should be carried on in the thread I linked in my previous post ?

[alexh]

StingRay who did the WHDload install of HOtL wrote something interesting in the notes:

the coder used move.l 4.w,(a6) which of
 course is not exactly what he wanted, the game only worked by coincidence
 on Kick1.x machines, destroying the ExecBase is certainly not a good
 thing to do when you want to use system routines)

I suspect this is quite a buggy game. The WHDload version works on 68000 CPUs if you have a HDD?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by SquawkBox

For those interested, here are the specs of my A500 according to WhichAmiga, first picture shows half meg ram config, second shows one meg ram config :

As you may see, it is the Fatter Agnus my machine is equipped with. Probably was fed with too much pudding from the Polish seller .


Well, that's more or less what they do mention in their own cracktro, don't they ? But anyway the game loads after one enters 'armies' at manual password prompt. I am not saying it won't break later on but, on the surface at least, it seems to load just fine.


Sorry no, try any version of the game on your A2000 you will notice it simply fails because of the presence of the 1 MB chip ram. Since ross has asked us to avoid multiple threads about games he might be interested in fixing to help those who are stuck with 1MB chip, may I kindly suggest further discussion about that very game should be carried on in the thread I linked in my previous post ?

They did a bork job, and by this, they corrupted the graphics by overwriting or corrupting the graphics

[ross]

Dragons of Flame patched into the Zone!

Contains fixes for 1MB chip-ram machines, KS3.1 and 010+ processors.

Started as always with a simple patch due to a stupid way of allocating memory, only to find nasty bugs in other parts of the code too..

[BarryB]

Nice work ross, thanks for taking the time to fix this

[SquawkBox]

No round of applause for the monitoring role I had in mentioning games that fail to load with =+1 MB chip mem, and standing with it ? Granted, it was turrican9 idea to raise that issue, but still .

[Excolion]

Originally Posted by ross

Dragons of Flame patched into the Zone!

Contains fixes for 1MB chip-ram machines, KS3.1 and 010+ processors.

Started as always with a simple patch due to a stupid way of allocating memory, only to find nasty bugs in other parts of the code too..

ross hello, I haven't used the zone yet but as I gather, the uploads stay up there for a limited period of time and I missed your upload. Is there a WHDLOAD pre-installed package for this game in your knowledge? I also wrote this in here but since you commented on this game a short while ago, I wanted to try my luck in this thread as well. Thanks in advance

[ross]

Originally Posted by Excolion

ross hello, I haven't used the zone yet but as I gather, the uploads stay up there for a limited period of time and I missed your upload. Is there a WHDLOAD pre-installed package for this game in your knowledge? I also wrote this in here but since you commented on this game a short while ago, I wanted to try my luck in this thread as well. Thanks in advance

Hi, no idea for WHDLoad version, but you can download the ADF here:
http://grandis.nu/turran/FTP/TheZone...rocessors].adf

[Excolion]

Cheers, it works nicely. After getting used to the in-game disk access speeds of WHDLOAD, going back to adf feels painful, but at least the series is complete. I hope Stingray makes it work with WHDload.

[dreadnought]

Thanks @ross AND SquawkBox for finding & fixing it. I love SSI's AD&D games, and always wanted to try these on Amiga (even though they're admittedly much weaker than the turn based ones).