XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

Harriet Bazley wrote in comp.sys.acorn.games:

None of the old Angband variants that I used to play so enthusiastically
on my A5000 seem to function on an ARMX6 even under Aemulor, despite the
fact that they are basically ASCII text displayed in a desktop window.
For example, Steamband
http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/steamband.html
will run the character generator when you start a new game, but exits
with a silent 'abort on data transfer' error as soon as it tries to
start the actual game (I suspect as soon as it tries to create the save
file, since nothing is saved).

I'm not all that interested in getting the latest Angband developments
ported to RISC OS - many of the old variants have long since ceased development anyway - but it would be nice to be able to get back some of
the plethora of ports that used to be available, all of them so far as I remember based off a single 'Angband compiling kit' that provides a
standard WIMP front end. https://rec.games.roguelike.angband.narkive.com/j3kwr1kh/announce-risc-os-ports

Looking at the Angband forums, where all the prior Usenet activity now
seems to reside, I see postings like "There comes a time in all
development projects where legacy support must be cut, and you must make
your users move on.[...] I think it's reasonably safe to say that
support for RISC is rather... unnecessary." :-( http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=2484

I've managed to trace Musus Umbra's original Angband porting package http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/compiling.htm
but that was the generation before Antony Sidwell's "32-bit" ports -
which are the ones that don't seem to work on the ARMX6's Cortex-A9
processor - so probably not a good basis for recompilation. :-(

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no longer
seem to exist.


--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

Confession is good for the soul, but bad for the career.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

Am Tue, 03 Aug 2021 19:10:12 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

Harriet Bazley wrote in comp.sys.acorn.games:

None of the old Angband variants that I used to play so
enthusiastically on my A5000 seem to function on an ARMX6 even under
Aemulor, despite the fact that they are basically ASCII text displayed
in a desktop window. ...

I'm not all that interested in getting the latest Angband developments
ported to RISC OS - many of the old variants have long since ceased
development anyway - but it would be nice to be able to get back some
of the plethora of ports that used to be available, all of them so far
as I remember based off a single 'Angband compiling kit' that provides
a standard WIMP front end.
https://rec.games.roguelike.angband.narkive.com/j3kwr1kh/announce-risc- os-ports

Looking at the Angband forums, where all the prior Usenet activity now
seems to reside, I see postings like "There comes a time in all
development projects where legacy support must be cut, and you must
make your users move on.[...] I think it's reasonably safe to say that
support for RISC is rather... unnecessary." :-(
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=2484

I don't think so. There are many people left and probably there are some
'new' too wich are willing to try RISC OS as a platform.

Some of them would probably appreciate a new version. Most of them would arrange with an older version - if it runs on newer machines.

As long as an Emulator runs on the new machine I think it should be
possible to use the old versions directly.

I've managed to trace Musus Umbra's original Angband porting package http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/compiling.htm but that was
the generation before Antony Sidwell's "32-bit" ports - which are the
ones that don't seem to work on the ARMX6's Cortex-A9 processor - so
probably not a good basis for recompilation. :-(

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no longer
seem to exist.

That's really a shame if so many sites are gone and nobody ever made a
copy wich allows to reconstruct them.

I only had the version that was availabe from StuttgartFTP - it worked perfectly on A5000 and other 3.1 machines. Never ever tried to use
Angband on a new machine. But I know that there are some new
"graphic'isch" versions for Unix/Linux/Win - eventually one of them will compile directly on a Cortex machine ??

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

On 7 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

Am Tue, 03 Aug 2021 19:10:12 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

Harriet Bazley wrote in comp.sys.acorn.games:

None of the old Angband variants that I used to play so
enthusiastically on my A5000 seem to function on an ARMX6 even under
Aemulor, despite the fact that they are basically ASCII text displayed
in a desktop window. ...

[snip]

As long as an Emulator runs on the new machine I think it should be
possible to use the old versions directly.

That's what puzzles me. Apparently they don't work under emulation,
even though they have no complex sound or graphics.

I've managed to trace Musus Umbra's original Angband porting package http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/compiling.htm but that was
the generation before Antony Sidwell's "32-bit" ports - which are the
ones that don't seem to work on the ARMX6's Cortex-A9 processor - so probably not a good basis for recompilation. :-(

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no longer seem to exist.

That's really a shame if so many sites are gone and nobody ever made a
copy wich allows to reconstruct them.

It's possible the site still exists on the Wayback Machine, but that's
no longer searchable from Netsurf. The URLs still work once a site has
been located, but if I try to search I just get "The Wayback Machine
requires your browser to support JavaScript".

And even the old non-RISC-OS-specific Angband sites (rephial.org, thangorodrim.net, clockwork.dementia.org) that used to host variants for different OSes are no longer in existence -- angband.ooz.cz seems to be
the last.

I only had the version that was availabe from StuttgartFTP - it worked perfectly on A5000 and other 3.1 machines. Never ever tried to use
Angband on a new machine.

I played almost exclusively on the A5000, but the ports did work on the
Iyonix - at least the later ones did. riscos.info states that "Old
classics such as MarsQuake and Angband are 32-bit safe and still popular
with RISC OS to this day".

Oooh, at a quick test Musus Umbra's 2001 port of vanilla Angband 2.9.3
*does* work under Aemulor, even if the 2004/2008 variants don't: http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/a293.zip

It's quite impressive how much muscle memory of the keystrokes I still
manage to retain!

And I've got my old copy of Psiband (1999) working... so maybe I need to
do some experimentation to see exactly which variants work and which
ones don't....


--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

On 7 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Harriet Bazley wrote:


[snip]

Oooh, at a quick test Musus Umbra's 2001 port of vanilla Angband 2.9.3
*does* work under Aemulor, even if the 2004/2008 variants don't: http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/a293.zip

It's quite impressive how much muscle memory of the keystrokes I still
manage to retain!

And I've got my old copy of Psiband (1999) working... so maybe I need to
do some experimentation to see exactly which variants work and which
ones don't....

Apparently I was incredibly lucky in picking those two at random. :-(


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.

I also have in my possession RISC OS ports of Gumband, CaTHband, Eyband, Kangband, sCthband, NPPAngband, Oangband, Quickband, Steamband and
Zangband, all of which fail in various ways and many of which fail in
the same way (either crashing when they attempt to read/write savefiles,
or when they attempt to parse the plaintext files that define the game).

I don't have the source for any version of Angband, with or without the
#ifdef RISCOS lines that were scheduled for removal in 2009....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Angband 3.0.9 (2007) complains about errors in 'terrain.txt' (the line
in question looks fine to me, or at least consistent with the format of
all its neighbours) and crashes.

Gumband (2008) complains about an error in the f_info.raw file, which is
the file generated from the terrain.txt file, and crashes.

CaTHband (2001) crashes with an abort on data transfer before it manages
to display any window at all.

Angband 2.4 Frog-knows (the original RISC OS port from 1993) works -
continuing the pattern of the older ports being more compatible!

Umoria (1992) works, and apparently I still have a level 26 character
alive in it - unfortunately I can't remember what to look out for and
how to play. :-(

Eyangband (2003) crashes with the error "Cannot parse 'limits.raw' file"
- there's clearly a pattern here, but none of the corresponding data
files being used to generate the raw files on startup have been altered
since I last played the game, and they are all human-readable plain text
files. So why should a change of processor affect the ability to use
them?

To my astonishment, Cthangband (1999), one of the most non-standard
variants, appears to work - I managed to play through several levels
before I was killed. Again, I can only guess that it's because it's one
of the oldest ports.

But then Kangband (also 1999), also very non-standard, fails to run with
the error "MususIfType not found", despite the fact that the MususUtils
module is listed as currently running under Aemulor.

SCthband (2005) allows you to enter the character creation screens, but
then exits with a silent (visible only in Reporter) abort on data
transfer error at the point where it tries to write the savefile and
start the game proper.

Discband (2000) works, although it's simply a copy of Zangband 2.4.0
with the uniques, potions and scrolls renamed with a Pratchettian
flavour - the application inside the Discband directory is even called !Zangband.

Kamband the wildly unbalanced (1999) works, amazingly - I ran a quick
warrior character and was killed by my own pets firing arrows at our
enemies, which I seem to remember is a very common hazard. The AI is
somewhat lacking!

NPPAngband (2006) gives the same mysterious terrain error; these
variants are simply crashing on the first line of terrain encountered in
the file.

Oangband (2005) crashes at the end of the character creation process
with "Unknown signal number 8", which is a new one!


Quickband (2005) crashes on the terrain file.

Sangband (1999) works.

Steamband (2008) either crashes with a 'broken save file' error, or
exits silently with an 'abort on data transfer' error when it attempts
to create a new savefile.

My copy of the Unangband application seems to have vanished from its
directory at some point, leaving behind only an orphaned savefile!

And Zangband (2003) crashes with the error 'Cannot parse misc.raw file',
which is presumably a variant on the various other mysterious failures
to initialise data files from text files. It's probably a very simple
issue, like a problem with line endings or Unix directory separators, or
an attempt to identify the current version of RISC OS that assumes
anything above 4.x is an error. :-(
(Judging by the datestamps, all the variants fail on the first data file
they attempt; they just attempt to start with different files).



--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

The purpose of rules is to make you think before you break them.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

Am Sat, 07 Aug 2021 19:36:46 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

On 7 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Harriet Bazley wrote:

[snip]

Oooh, at a quick test Musus Umbra's 2001 port of vanilla Angband 2.9.3
*does* work under Aemulor, even if the 2004/2008 variants don't:
http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/a293.zip

It's quite impressive how much muscle memory of the keystrokes I still
manage to retain!

And I've got my old copy of Psiband (1999) working... so maybe I need
to do some experimentation to see exactly which variants work and which
ones don't....

Apparently I was incredibly lucky in picking those two at random. :-(

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.

I also have in my possession RISC OS ports of Gumband, CaTHband, Eyband, Kangband, sCthband, NPPAngband, Oangband, Quickband, Steamband and
Zangband, all of which fail in various ways and many of which fail in
the same way (either crashing when they attempt to read/write savefiles,
or when they attempt to parse the plaintext files that define the game).

I don't have the source for any version of Angband, with or without the #ifdef RISCOS lines that were scheduled for removal in 2009....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Angband 3.0.9 (2007) complains about errors in 'terrain.txt' (the line
in question looks fine to me, or at least consistent with the format of
all its neighbours) and crashes.

Gumband (2008) complains about an error in the f_info.raw file, which is
the file generated from the terrain.txt file, and crashes.

CaTHband (2001) crashes with an abort on data transfer before it manages
to display any window at all.

Angband 2.4 Frog-knows (the original RISC OS port from 1993) works - continuing the pattern of the older ports being more compatible!

Umoria (1992) works, and apparently I still have a level 26 character
alive in it - unfortunately I can't remember what to look out for and
how to play. :-(

Eyangband (2003) crashes with the error "Cannot parse 'limits.raw' file"
- there's clearly a pattern here, but none of the corresponding data
files being used to generate the raw files on startup have been altered
since I last played the game, and they are all human-readable plain text files. So why should a change of processor affect the ability to use
them?

To my astonishment, Cthangband (1999), one of the most non-standard
variants, appears to work - I managed to play through several levels
before I was killed. Again, I can only guess that it's because it's one
of the oldest ports.

But then Kangband (also 1999), also very non-standard, fails to run with
the error "MususIfType not found", despite the fact that the MususUtils module is listed as currently running under Aemulor.

SCthband (2005) allows you to enter the character creation screens, but
then exits with a silent (visible only in Reporter) abort on data
transfer error at the point where it tries to write the savefile and
start the game proper.

Discband (2000) works, although it's simply a copy of Zangband 2.4.0
with the uniques, potions and scrolls renamed with a Pratchettian
flavour - the application inside the Discband directory is even called !Zangband.

Kamband the wildly unbalanced (1999) works, amazingly - I ran a quick
warrior character and was killed by my own pets firing arrows at our
enemies, which I seem to remember is a very common hazard. The AI is somewhat lacking!

NPPAngband (2006) gives the same mysterious terrain error; these
variants are simply crashing on the first line of terrain encountered in
the file.

Oangband (2005) crashes at the end of the character creation process
with "Unknown signal number 8", which is a new one!

Quickband (2005) crashes on the terrain file.

Sangband (1999) works.

Steamband (2008) either crashes with a 'broken save file' error, or
exits silently with an 'abort on data transfer' error when it attempts
to create a new savefile.

My copy of the Unangband application seems to have vanished from its directory at some point, leaving behind only an orphaned savefile!

And Zangband (2003) crashes with the error 'Cannot parse misc.raw file', which is presumably a variant on the various other mysterious failures
to initialise data files from text files. It's probably a very simple issue, like a problem with line endings or Unix directory separators, or
an attempt to identify the current version of RISC OS that assumes
anything above 4.x is an error. :-(
(Judging by the datestamps, all the variants fail on the first data file
they attempt; they just attempt to start with different files).

I never get the point why there are so many different types of this
game ... Sangband, Kamband, Zangband and many more.

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.


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. Others are eventually not found because of typos in the source
code.


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.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

Am Sat, 07 Aug 2021 19:36:46 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

On 7 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Harriet Bazley wrote:

[snip]

Oooh, at a quick test Musus Umbra's 2001 port of vanilla Angband 2.9.3
*does* work under Aemulor, even if the 2004/2008 variants don't:
http://www.zen22994.zen.co.uk/musus/angband/a293.zip

It's quite impressive how much muscle memory of the keystrokes I still
manage to retain!

And I've got my old copy of Psiband (1999) working... so maybe I need
to do some experimentation to see exactly which variants work and which
ones don't....

Apparently I was incredibly lucky in picking those two at random. :-(

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.

I also have in my possession RISC OS ports of Gumband, CaTHband, Eyband, Kangband, sCthband, NPPAngband, Oangband, Quickband, Steamband and
Zangband, all of which fail in various ways and many of which fail in
the same way (either crashing when they attempt to read/write savefiles,
or when they attempt to parse the plaintext files that define the game).

I don't have the source for any version of Angband, with or without the #ifdef RISCOS lines that were scheduled for removal in 2009....

The Thangorodrim Site - wich seems to be the precursor site to
rephial.org is also available on

https://web.archive.org/web/20210622152216/http://www.thangorodrim.net/

There are many timepoints when archive tock a "shot". So eventually there
is enough info to get some hints.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

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.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

On 8 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

The Thangorodrim Site - wich seems to be the precursor site to
rephial.org is also available on

https://web.archive.org/web/20210622152216/http://www.thangorodrim.net/

There are many timepoints when archive tock a "shot". So eventually there
is enough info to get some hints.

I think rephial.org was thus named because the original Angband site was
Ben Harrison's http://www.phial.com - which, ironically, still exists,
even though its two successors have gone down.

This is apparently a mirror of the old FTP.sunet.se site as of June 25,
2011:
http://www.zaimoni.com/zaiband/Angband.ref/

This is the current archive version of
ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/Angband/Acorn, which appears to extend up to 2004
and only covers vanilla Angband:

https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/Angband/Acorn/

It contains Musus Umbra's porting kit (version 1.26 of 1999), but not
Antony Sidwell's 2004 version.
But here are his (Antony's) instructions for how to make an Angband
port: https://rec.games.roguelike.angband.narkive.com/toRiRxl7/risc-os-missing-upgrades
https://narkive.com/toRiRxl7.12

Musus Umbra's kit does contain !Angband.src.c.main-acn, but the
makefiles are targetted at Angband 2.8.x, so who knows how much tweaking
would be required to get both or either to work with later versions.


--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

Nothing is foolproof - to a sufficiently talented fool

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In article <e1824b5859.harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk>,
Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> wrote:

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no
longer seem to exist.

That's really a shame if so many sites are gone and nobody ever made a
copy wich allows to reconstruct them.

It's possible the site still exists on the Wayback Machine, but that's
no longer searchable from Netsurf. The URLs still work once a site has
been located, but if I try to search I just get "The Wayback Machine
requires your browser to support JavaScript".

The Wayback Machine search works on the Iris browser on RiscOS but sadly
the ajps site is reported as not archived.

Alan

--
alan.dawes@argonet.co.uk
alan.dawes@riscos.org
Using an ARMX6

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Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 10:35:07 +0100 schrieb Alan Dawes:

In article <e1824b5859.harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk>,
Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> wrote:

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no
longer seem to exist.

That's really a shame if so many sites are gone and nobody ever made
a copy wich allows to reconstruct them.

It's possible the site still exists on the Wayback Machine, but that's
no longer searchable from Netsurf. The URLs still work once a site has
been located, but if I try to search I just get "The Wayback Machine
requires your browser to support JavaScript".

The Wayback Machine search works on the Iris browser on RiscOS but sadly
the ajps site is reported as not archived.

That's not true !

It is archived - but the name ends with .nu (not .au)

At

<https://web.archive.org/web/20090130011516/http://ajps.mine.nu/angband/ ports/index.htm>

You can find all the versions that are made with Archimedes/RiscPC in
mind. So at best it runs with !Aemulor or !Archie or !RPCEmu.

The version I mentioned above and wich had been installed "here" is the
topmost - the "Red Dragon" one. This one did fine - ages ago.


All the Best and a good hunt in the deeper corners of the dungeon,
Sebastian

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Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 03:06:09 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

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 ...

OK, for such 'needs' I didn't played this game not often enough. I always
had been trapped or killed or died otherwise. But probably this is the
normal way for such a game - to get modified massively by its fans. Same
story as in Doom oder HalfLive.

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.)

Meets the demands of nowadays players better than the other verisons.

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

iconbar ... is an interesting place. Much things there nobody knows
about. ;)

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

Source is the primary problem. Secondary is to find a skilled person who
is willing to do such a "conversion". E.g. for Quickband and the last
version of Angband known to work on RISC OS.

If the sources can be found, it shouldn't be "too hard" for an
experienced programmer - as far as I understood, there is a RISCOS Layer
wich doesn't interact to closely with the game code.

[snip]

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"!

I didn't try. I only found the website and 3.0.5 was a 'later' version
wich had working sources and programm download links.

But I will try some of these many "Xngbands" in the next few days/weeks.
But since I use !RPCEmu more often than RPi I think it will run out of
the box. We'll see.

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. :-(

The last Angband version I played was on Linux and had some interesting graphis.


Many thanks for the massive Links. Angband - seems to be a little
software universe in itself.


Bye,
SBn

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On 8 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 03:06:09 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

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!

[snip]

Source is the primary problem. Secondary is to find a skilled person who
is willing to do such a "conversion". E.g. for Quickband and the last
version of Angband known to work on RISC OS.

If the sources can be found, it shouldn't be "too hard" for an
experienced programmer - as far as I understood, there is a RISCOS Layer
wich doesn't interact to closely with the game code.

Yes, thanks to your detective work I managed to find the latest version
of it :-)

http://www.bazleyfamily.co.uk/angband/angband-kit.zip



Here's the source code to Angband 3.0.9, which is the last version
officially to support RISC OS:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200221040230/http://rephial.org/downloads/3.0/angband-3.0.9-src.tar.gz


The Angband community has actually been pretty good at preserving old
material - here's the source for OAngband 0.7.0 (the last version ported
to RISC OS) and many other versions: http://www.zaimoni.com/zaiband/Angband.ref/OAngband/


Here's the source to Quickband 1.0.5, and later versions : http://angband.oook.cz/variants.php?variant=quick


Here's the source to Steamband 0.4.1:

http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/Steamband-041f-SRC.zip


Here's the source to old versions of Unangband, if you can work around SourceForge download issues:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/unangband.berlios/files/


Here's the source to Zangband 2.7.3:

https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/zangband/zangband-src/2.7.3/zangband-2.7.3.tar.gz


And most of the rest are probably still around on the zaimoni.com
snapshot, if nowhere else....


[snip]

But I will try some of these many "Xngbands" in the next few days/weeks.
But since I use !RPCEmu more often than RPi I think it will run out of
the box. We'll see.

If you're emulating a RiscPC environment, I assume it should be fine.
:-)

Many thanks for the massive Links. Angband - seems to be a little
software universe in itself.

It is - or at least, it was.

Apparently there was a massive wave of variants at the time of the
release of Angband 2.9.3, which made the game far more easy to customise
- looking at the list of variants on angband.oook.cz, I don't think many
of them continued being developed for very long!


--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

On 8 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 10:35:07 +0100 schrieb Alan Dawes:

In article <e1824b5859.harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk>,
Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> wrote:

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no
longer seem to exist.

[snip]

The Wayback Machine search works on the Iris browser on RiscOS but sadly the ajps site is reported as not archived.

That's not true !

It is archived - but the name ends with .nu (not .au)

At

<https://web.archive.org/web/20090130011516/http://ajps.mine.nu/angband/ports/index.htm>

You can find all the versions that are made with Archimedes/RiscPC in
mind. So at best it runs with !Aemulor or !Archie or !RPCEmu.

Nice detective work!

Sadly http://ajps.mine.nu/angband/ports/angband-kit.zip or http://ajps.mine.nu/angband/angband-kit.zip don't seem to exist (even if
that page was archived in 2009 and the kit was supposedly uploaded on 13 December 2004...)

Aha - but by crawling around and looking at where those download links
actually point, I can locate https://web.archive.org/web/20070126080114/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/isparp1/angband/angband-kit.zip
which *does* exist. That archive seems to be seriously mangled (the end
has been chopped off at some point, and there's no way of knowing what's missing), but using Infozip:zip -FF I can get a readable version of
what's left: version 1.31 of the porting kit as versus Musus' version
1.26. Apparently it features "some 32-bit cleanup by Harriet Bazley",
which I have to say I don't have any memory of at all, and don't
remember ever being qualified to do, either!

By inspection of the actual zipfile I think it's probably only a few
bytes of the zipfile central directory that got truncated and not the
actual data as such, since the end of the archive consists of a list of filenames. In fact, by comparison of the download with my 'fixed'
version I think I can identify exactly where the file got cut off, which
means there were 9432 bytes missing, all of which consist of filename
data duplicated in the actual body of the archive. So that means I've
now got an entire working copy, with nothing missing save for (by the
looks of it!) a certain amount of filetype data, which it should be
possible to deduce from context.

And it's got the vital main-ros/c file, which creates a functioning RISC
OS front end application.... (Having seen what happens with the SDL
version - no offence meant - I'd say that's fairly essential for getting
RISC OS users to accept the game.)


(Ah, I've just located my contribution: the BASIC source for the MuLite module, "reverse-engineered, bug-fixed and 32-bit-safed by H.Bazley 12th
May 2003"! I still have absolutely zero recollection of doing that,
but it is at least vaguely plausible that I might once have been
competent to do so. All the calls to that module could probably be
dropped now, since all it does is supply *commands that didn't exist in
RISC OS 3.1 and 2.)



Right, I've been through setting all the filetypes by analogy with the
old version of the toolkit (and a little deduction), and I'm pretty sure
I've now got what ought to be a working version of the Angband porting
kit, with its complete instructions for cross-compilation etc. So
given the source for an Angband variant circa 2004, a C compiler
suitable for targeting the modern processors, and a sufficient knowledge
of C programming, makefiles, etc., it *should* be possible to recompile
Angband for RISC OS and/or debug the cause of the various weird
errors...!

I can put it on my website, though it would be better hosted somewhere
else.
http://www.bazleyfamily.co.uk/angband/angband-kit.zip (217Kb)

The version I mentioned above and wich had been installed "here" is the topmost - the "Red Dragon" one. This one did fine - ages ago.

I had version 3.0.9 from July 2007, which did fine... on the other
computer! On the ARMX6 it just gives errors with the terrain definition
files on the Cortex A9 processor.

The port on this page (version 3.0.6) crashes in a new and original way
with a "no writable memory at this address" error, and I have to type
*Desktop to get back control. Aemulor makes no difference to either of
them.


--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground... and missing.

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Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 21:15:18 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

On 8 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 10:35:07 +0100 schrieb Alan Dawes:

In article <e1824b5859.harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk>,
Harriet Bazley <harriet@bazleyfamily.co.uk> wrote:

Antony Sidwell's site http://ajps.mine.au and its Angband-Kit no
longer seem to exist.

[snip]

The Wayback Machine search works on the Iris browser on RiscOS but
sadly the ajps site is reported as not archived.

That's not true !

It is archived - but the name ends with .nu (not .au)

At

<https://web.archive.org/web/20090130011516/http://ajps.mine.nu/ angband/ports/index.htm>

Nice detective work!

... but by crawling around and looking at where those download links
actually point, I can locate https://web.archive.org/web/20070126080114/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/

isparp1/angband/angband-kit.zip

which *does* exist. That archive seems to be seriously mangled (the end
has been chopped off at some point, and there's no way of knowing what's missing), but using Infozip:zip -FF I can get a readable version of
what's left: version 1.31 of the porting kit as versus Musus' version
1.26. Apparently it features "some 32-bit cleanup by Harriet Bazley", which I have to say I don't have any memory of at all, and don't
remember ever being qualified to do, either!

By inspection of the actual zipfile I think it's probably only a few
bytes of the zipfile central directory that got truncated and not the
actual data as such, since the end of the archive consists of a list of filenames. In fact, by comparison of the download with my 'fixed'
version I think I can identify exactly where the file got cut off, which means there were 9432 bytes missing, all of which consist of filename
data duplicated in the actual body of the archive. So that means I've
now got an entire working copy, with nothing missing save for (by the
looks of it!) a certain amount of filetype data, which it should be
possible to deduce from context.

And it's got the vital main-ros/c file, which creates a functioning RISC
OS front end application.... (Having seen what happens with the SDL
version - no offence meant - I'd say that's fairly essential for getting
RISC OS users to accept the game.)

Sounds pomising. I would also say that a little WIMP aroundings are
extremly helpful in acceptance. The version I knew had only the
"mainframe variant" of save included, wich meant on had to use a save
command from within the games control commands. Since I tried v 3.0.5
yesterday the comfort has been increased VERY by the inclusion of a save
dialog an the possibility to use F3 as the "normal" speedsave key.
Extremley helpful. The other things like iconbar icon and a little menu
with informations about the authors are essential for RISCOS to get a
good feeling. E.g. Elite does this too - nobody needs this extra for the
game, but its much better integrated into the desktop experience.
But the best thing in 3.0.5 has been the option to maximize or at least
"blow up" the viewport of the game from its normal 40x24 (or so) to a
much larger view of the dungeon. This gives a massive better game
overview.
Short: WIMP integeration is a must. And its done already.

I've seen the Mulite module and a ZAPreadraw module. The latter one can eventually simply be replaced by a newer variant wich is > ARM7/SA clean
and usable at the latest machines.

(Ah, I've just located my contribution: the BASIC source for the MuLite module, "reverse-engineered, bug-fixed and 32-bit-safed by H.Bazley 12th
May 2003"! I still have absolutely zero recollection of doing that,
but it is at least vaguely plausible that I might once have been
competent to do so.

Thats the point where one should think about his/her consciousness or
rethink the use of to much beer in the lonesome nights. :)

Green tea is good alternative; 'cause there is a always an alternative.

All the calls to that module could probably be
dropped now, since all it does is supply *commands that didn't exist in
RISC OS 3.1 and 2.)

But it should be kept save - eventually - if(!) anybody can be found who
is willing to recompile the complete thing, it could be of much use if
there are some other compiles of newer angband versions >= v4 wich then
could be made run on older machines too.

Right, I've been through setting all the filetypes by analogy with the
old version of the toolkit (and a little deduction), and I'm pretty sure
I've now got what ought to be a working version of the Angband porting
kit, with its complete instructions for cross-compilation etc. So
given the source for an Angband variant circa 2004, a C compiler
suitable for targeting the modern processors, and a sufficient knowledge
of C programming, makefiles, etc., it *should* be possible to recompile Angband for RISC OS and/or debug the cause of the various weird
errors...!

I can put it on my website, though it would be better hosted somewhere
else.
http://www.bazleyfamily.co.uk/angband/angband-kit.zip (217Kb)

Together with the last version v 3.0.9 this would be a very good move
towards a "NEW" game for the new and forthcoming generations RISCOS
computers.


<https://web.archive.org/web/20200221040230/http://rephial.org/ downloads/3.0/angband-3.0.9-src.tar.gz>


If You have an account at ROOL You eventually could do a new thread with
links to the angband-kit.zip to v 3.0.9 and to the Quickband Sources.
With some good luck this will activate somebody who is willing to do the (little) conversions and the recompiling.

The version I mentioned above and wich had been installed "here" is the
topmost - the "Red Dragon" one. This one did fine - ages ago.

I had version 3.0.9 from July 2007, which did fine... on the other
computer! On the ARMX6 it just gives errors with the terrain definition files on the Cortex A9 processor.

The port on this page (version 3.0.6) crashes in a new and original way
with a "no writable memory at this address" error, and I have to type *Desktop to get back control. Aemulor makes no difference to either of
them.

I would give not too much on this kind of errors. Since the ROOL Code remodelled the RAM usage (page zero(?)) and especially since the
exclusion of pre 32Bit programs their are many errors with older
software. And Aemulor - as good as its existence is for usability of the
big productive programs - doesn't allow to run all of the older stuff in
a way one would expect it.


By the way - I used the Angband v 3.0.5 I wrote about on a !RPCEmu with
RISCOS 3.7 where it could be used in all its flavours. And it took at
least 2 hours - then I died in the deeper dungeon at Level 3 beeing
beaten by two big an poisened spider; no Chance; all 37 healthpoints gone
away in seconds. Too bad. :( .... ;)

But: the same thing didn't started in RISCOS 5.22 (with and without the
free Aeomulor module); the RPi test will be done sometimes, but I think it
will give the same result.

We'll see.


All the best,
SBn

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XPost: comp.sys.acorn.games

On 9 Aug 2021 as I do recall,
Sebastian Barthel wrote:

Am Sun, 08 Aug 2021 21:15:18 +0100 schrieb Harriet Bazley:

[snip]

I would also say that a little WIMP aroundings are extremly helpful in acceptance. The version I knew had only the "mainframe variant" of
save included, wich meant on had to use a save command from within the
games control commands. Since I tried v 3.0.5 yesterday the comfort
has been increased VERY by the inclusion of a save dialog an the
possibility to use F3 as the "normal" speedsave key. Extremley
helpful.

I don't think I ever bothered to use the save command - I used to use
Ctrl-X for 'save and exit' in order to leave the game, and relied on
Angband's not crashing during play. Which it almost never did.

The WIMP version does have a 'panic save' feature compiled into it which
will attempt to save a !!PANIC!! file if it crashes, in order to avoid overwriting your existing savefile. I think I did see that happen a
couple of times in some of the more weird variants, and the panic
savefiles did restore the game successfully. It seems to be a very
stable application.

The other things like iconbar icon and a little menu with informations
about the authors are essential for RISCOS to get a good feeling. E.g.
Elite does this too - nobody needs this extra for the game, but its
much better integrated into the desktop experience. But the best thing
in 3.0.5 has been the option to maximize or at least "blow up" the
viewport of the game from its normal 40x24 (or so) to a much larger
view of the dungeon. This gives a massive better game overview. Short:
WIMP integeration is a must. And its done already.

I remember reading about 'bigscreen support' in the Help files, but I
don't think I ever tried to use it (I don't even know how!)
I've been playing on the standard dungeon layout for too long, ever
since 2.4 Frog-knows ("Ported to the Arc by STRYQX" in 1993).

I've seen the Mulite module and a ZAPreadraw module. The latter one can eventually simply be replaced by a newer variant wich is > ARM7/SA clean
and usable at the latest machines.

The MuLite 1.00 module (as versus 0.01 provided in the older ports)
ought to be 32-bit safe but apparently isn't. Trying to use the
MususDo command gives an 'undefined instruction' error. Looking at the ReportWhere command and at the BASIC assembler source suggests that the
problem is that this part of the module is actually the strings in the
module command table and not valid machine code in the first place, but
I have no idea why it is getting executed. :-(

The module is extremely simple, but I don't remember enough about module construction (or indeed about assembler; why is my STMFD instruction
being disassembled by StrongED as SMTDB, and what do either of them
mean?) to work out what is going wrong.

On the other hand, simply replacing all references to MususDo and MususIconSprites in the !Boot file with the modern Do and IconSprites
commands respectively is sufficient to fix that particular error.
It's just rather embarrassing, since I was personally responsible for
creating it!

[snip]

All the calls to that module could probably be
dropped now, since all it does is supply *commands that didn't exist in RISC OS 3.1 and 2.)

But it should be kept save - eventually - if(!) anybody can be found who
is willing to recompile the complete thing, it could be of much use if
there are some other compiles of newer angband versions >= v4 wich then
could be made run on older machines too.

I suspect that it probably isn't possible to compile a C program which
would run on all versions of RISC OS from RISC OS 2 to RISC OS 5/6, or
from an ARM2 to the latest ARM chips. I also suspect that the Angband
ports probably haven't been able to run on RISC OS 2 for some time - I
was probably the last person still regularly using them on RISC OS 3.1,
which was why I put the effort into trying to update the MuLite module
instead of letting Antony Sidwell simply use the Do command.

I don't know if it would be possible to compile newer variants in a way
that would allow them still to function on RISC OS 3.1, but I don't
think there are any programmers left who would bother to do so (the only
reason for doing it is if you want to use the software yourself!) The
MuLite module is only useful if you are running RISC OS 3.1 - it would
be nice to understand why it has stopped working, but I don't think any
future releases of Angband are very likely to want it....


In fact, looking at the release notes for Angband 3.0.9, I see that by
2007 MususUtils ("and the last vestiges of RISC OS 2 support") and
ZapRedraw had both been dropped from the distribution package. Which
means that the version of the Angband-Kit that I located is not, after
all, the latest one - newer versions had mouse-click support, although
frankly I'm not too worried about losing that!

I suspect that may be the reason why I don't ever remember playing it
much, or at all - the A5000 was my main Angband-playing machine. I
still have the original release archive for 'Angband309' and can e-mail
it to you if you are curious; it ought to be fine under !RPCEmu.

Right, I've been through setting all the filetypes by analogy with the
old version of the toolkit (and a little deduction),

Only apparently the version I initially uploaded wasn't actually the
one which had them set. Whoops!

and I'm pretty sure I've now got what ought to be a working version
of the Angband porting kit, with its complete instructions for cross-compilation etc. So given the source for an Angband variant
circa 2004, a C compiler suitable for targeting the modern
processors, and a sufficient knowledge of C programming, makefiles,
etc., it *should* be possible to recompile Angband for RISC OS
and/or debug the cause of the various weird errors...!

I can put it on my website, though it would be better hosted somewhere else.
http://www.bazleyfamily.co.uk/angband/angband-kit.zip (217Kb)

Together with the last version v 3.0.9 this would be a very good move
towards a "NEW" game for the new and forthcoming generations RISCOS computers.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20200221040230/http://rephial.org/ downloads/3.0/angband-3.0.9-src.tar.gz>

If You have an account at ROOL You eventually could do a new thread with links to the angband-kit.zip to v 3.0.9 and to the Quickband Sources.
With some good luck this will activate somebody who is willing to do the (little) conversions and the recompiling.

I don't have accounts on any of the web boards (I don't normally read
them, unless they show up as Web search results). I think you're right,
and that most of the active programmers are probably to be found there
(no doubt browsing from their Linux machines) rather than on
comp.sys.acorn.*


[snip]

By the way - I used the Angband v 3.0.5 I wrote about on a !RPCEmu with RISCOS 3.7 where it could be used in all its flavours. And it took at
least 2 hours - then I died in the deeper dungeon at Level 3 beeing
beaten by two big an poisened spider; no Chance; all 37 healthpoints gone away in seconds. Too bad. :( .... ;)

Yes, Angband really is ridiculously addictive and playable for
what is still basically a mainframe ASCII game. :-D

But: the same thing didn't started in RISCOS 5.22 (with and without the
free Aeomulor module); the RPi test will be done sometimes, but I think it will give the same result.

That helps to confirm that it is a general problem with later versions
of RISC OS rather than with a specific processor.

--
Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie ==

Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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