www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

Hello there,

I have been using your virtual acorn version 1.4 on my Pc with windows XP for about a year now and am, I must say very pleased with it. Over Christmas I decided that should finally decided to get my old A3000 (with an oak SCSI) up from the cellar and try to transfer some of my old games over.
Quite a few of the games do work on VA, some (especially the 4th Dimension ones) as mentioned somewhere on your website don’t. My problem is that quite a few cannot get enough screen memory (Can’t move memory or not enough screen memory messages). I tried using * commands to increase (or decrease in one case) the memory, this had no effect however.
Is there anyway to alter the screen memory for these games, it seems to be really frozen at 480K.

Another problem I have now, is that a day or so later VA refused to start, it always brings the error message 0:!Boot not found. I am sure that I haven`t deleted anything. It happened after I tried to start VA with a floppy that I had forgotten about in the drive.

To round up a bad week my A3000 with all the software on the SCSI harddisc refuses now to boot from the harddisc and will not recognise any floopy discs (ADFS not found). So I am hoping you can help me with at least one of my problems. I am sure that you are always very busy, so any help would be much appreciated.

Regards

Michael Cooper

P.S. I am sure that a lot of your customers including myself would be very happy if any one at VA or Arcdisc could find a solution to the problem of not being able to read copy protected discs (like the afore mentioned 4th Dimension ones). If that was included in any new version I am sure it would sell like hot cakes.

Dealing with things in sequence.

RISC OS 3.11 only supports a maximum of 480K of screen
memory, if you running older games try changing to Mode 12
first before loading the game.

Failing to boot is caused by an older game (possibly a RO2 or
Arthur game) re-configuring the CMOS, run the CMOS restore
program on the VA5000 CD to fix this.

I would guess a similar thing has happened to the A3000, try
turning it on with DELETE held down it might then get into
the desktop.

Hello Aaron,

thanks forn the previous information, most of it did help.

Even though a lot of the games do now work in mode 12, there are still 3 common error messages.

1. bad file name `Net:%logon??
2. cannot move memory
3. Module xyz not found

In the case of one game, Talisman (which for some strange reason my son has taken to), the first and third (module s1 not found) errors are displayed. Now I seem to remember from years ago that Talisman was not RISC OS3 compatible. Would this incompatibility just be the module not found error message?

Are there any commands that I can use to move the memory to the required level?

A word of warning to anyone else who wants get some old acorn games going on VA, Terramex (a silly game anyway) will cause a complete crash. VA will not run afterwards, it needs to be reinstalled.

Thanks again for the help.

Michael

PS are there any new versions of Virtual A5000 (or patches) planned or will the the new Risc Pc emulator make this obsolete.

It sounds like the games you are running are not RISC OS 3 compatible, I downloaded a copy of Terramex from Acorn Arcade some time ago and that works fine on VA5000. Check the game boxes to see what versions of RISC OS they are designed for (note that your copy of Terramex may even be an Arthur game).

Hi again,

well I guess that wraps up that then. I might have early versions of all the games.

I don't suppose VA would work with my RISC OS2 would it?

No, I don't know if !A310Emu/!Emulate would run on VA5000 but
that will run RISC OS 2.

Hello again,

does anyone happen to know if there is there a serial link software or PC disc read/writer that I can use to transfere data from my A3000 to a PC.

Thanks.

Michael

You could try transfering stuff on 720K DOS floppies, you will need
to compress files first, preferably using !ZipEE. As for Serial port
transfer I think that ZeriLink might do what you want.

Some RISC OS3-compatible games don't work with VA5000 if it's allowed to boot fully, but will if !Boot is renamed so VA5000 starts up as pure RO3.
For example, the bad file name 'Net:%logon' error only occurs if VA5000 boots fully; otherwise these games run fine. I've finally managed to track this down to "alias$logon" - if this is *unset then the error doesn't occur.