Most games not working on rpcemu0.9.4

Hello folks,

Newbie here, in desperate need of some help!

I’ve successfully installed RPCemu on my mac, but the only .adf I am able to load from the RPCemu disc drive is Pacmania. Twinworld gives me an internal error as soon as it loads, and the rest of these just hang: Lemmings, Lander, Holedout, ManUnited Europe

I’ve tried using riscos 3.7 and 5.28 + various combinations of RAM, RiscPC/A7000 and still no luck. And I’ve run it on Macos High Sierra (10.13.6) and Macos Monterey (12) with the same results.

Does anyone have any ideas what else I can try here?

Thank you in advance! :-)

Mike, it seems possible that your account may have been accidentally deleted as collateral damage from a large scale sign up attack this morning. If so, apologies, and please sign up again.

RISC OS filetype ‘adf’ is a PDF file.

RISC OS filetype ‘adf’ is a PDF file.

RISC OS filetype 0xadf is a PDF, but the OP said “.adf”. That’s a filename extension, and one belonging to a relevant-to-the-question floppy disc image format at that.

Newbie here, in desperate need of some help!

You won’t get many games to run under RPCEmu. Most games require an A-series and simply don’t work on a RiscPC. You also can’t use ADFFS to get them working as RPCEmu doesn’t quite emulate the CPU accurately enough for ADFFS to work.

You would need to use a Mac build of Arculator so probably head over to the Stardot emulator forum as I’m sure some people have compiled it for a Mac.

collateral damage from a large scale sign up attack this morning

Given that these are all coming from GMail, what with it permitting “invisible dots” so one can have email addresses like je.a.n.paull.aw.4[at]gmail.com and je.an.pa.ull.aw.4[at]gmail.com (and so on for many permutations), can I please make a suggestion?

Can we just disallow signups with GMail? Drop an apology on the sign up page and simply refuse anybody using GMail to sign up? It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Furthermore, I don’t rather like the idea of Google thinking it can lecture us on security and best-internet-practice when they’re so incapable of keeping their own house in order.

I’ve just deleted another 35 accounts. This particular nuisance has been going for 24 hours now.

Can we just disallow signups with GMail?

Probably not a great idea when a significant part of the world is using GMail these days.

I’ve looked at this before when people were whinging that ISPs are dropping email accounts, and have just gone back to revisit the data. On a list of around 100 non-computery people¹ that I regularly email, 56% are using GMail. Of the rest, 21% are on MS cloud accounts, 5% on Yahoo!, and of the rest there’s a handful of Appple users, some on ISPs (Sky, Virgin, BT), and a few like me who run their own domains. And one AOL user.

Decrying GMail as “just for spammers” isn’t really accurate these days, and probably hasn’t ever been outside of the RISC OS echo chamber.

¹ As in, they’re happy to use computers, but it’s not their life as it is for some around here.

Edit – There’s a lot of GMail users on the RISC OS platform, too (I’ve had a look at another mailing list that’s a bit closer to home), so blocking GMail would prevent legitimate platform users from gaining access as well. So no, let’s not do that.

Probably not a great idea when a significant part of the world is using GMail these days.

But how many real, contributing people here are signed up with a gmail/googlemail address?

(Anyone can read the content here without needing to sign up. It’s people who want to post here that we need to concern ourselves with.)

And three more since I posted about the previous 35…

Given that these are all coming from GMail, what with it permitting “invisible dots” so one can have email addresses like je.a.n.paull.aw.4[at]gmail.com and je.an.pa.ull.aw.4[at]gmail.com (and so on for many permutations), can I please make a suggestion?

Very easy to filter with Regex. If that is the problem. Happy to help with regex to match email addresses if this is the problem.

But how many real, contributing people here are signed up with a gmail/googlemail address?

That’s not relevant, as we’re already here and don’t need to sign up. The question that you should be asking is “how many real, contributing people (such as the person whose account you deleted this morning after they asked a perfectly valid question), who might wish to take an interest in the platform, are using GMail?”

My unscientific sample of around 100 people aged between 18 and 80+ suggests upwards of 50% could be. And if you’re only interested in RISC OS users, a quick glance at the addresses to which I mail a newsletter each month or so suggests there are a lot of GMail users about. Plus when a subscribed address is changed these days, it’s often to a GMail one.

such as the person whose account you deleted this morning after they asked a perfectly valid question

That was an accident. I thought I had been very careful NOT to delete the account, but clearly not careful enough. It’s unfortunate that he signed up in the midst of some hundreds of badly-intentioned signups, each of which had to be deleted manually.

That was an accident.

But beside the point. Their presence shows that there are new people interested in signing up and contributing to this forum. You can’t just deny them access based on the fact that you don’t like their email provider of choice. If your account validation process is broken, then you need to fix that – not turn away valid new account holders because that’s easier for you to do.

I couldn’t find a mac version of Arculator. I thought maybe I could install Aemulor on my current RPCemu RISC PC setup? But I don’t know how. I downloaded it but the readme doesn’t tell me how I can install it on RPCemu. Presumably I’ll have to copy the zip or elements of the zip into hostfs or something like that, but my attempts have failed and I can’t find instructions anywhere.

Would anyone be so kind as to tell me how they installed Aemulor on RPCemu?

Thanks.

If you use RO 3.7 with RPCEmu then Aemulor is not required. It will also be more compatible with games, although as Jon said, most games expect RO3.1 on an Archimedes era machine.

Arculator for Mac – https://github.com/richstokes/arculator-mac
Not tried it, don’t have a Mac.

You can’t just deny them access

That aged well.

Seriously, it’s a massive problem and it’s the volunteers running the site and helping out with it that are the ones being left to pick up the pieces and tidy up the mess.

Just be glad that this time the spammers were only interested in creating hundreds upon hundreds of zombie accounts, rather than hundreds upon hundreds of spams.
But, again, somebody gets to tidy up the mess and the sheer simplicity of how the ROOL system works means it’s one by one by one (and, yes, when you’re looking at a hundred entries it sort of gets to be a rote task and that’s how accidents happen – I’m sure everybody here has at some time clicked away a message only to think “hang on, what did that just say? what did I just do?”).

All new sign-ups have been disabled.

the sheer simplicity of how the ROOL system works

I’m going to guess that it doesn’t also have an option for “move these posts about spam to a new thread”… alas I’m making the problem worse by saying that :(

That aged well.

I don’t know… Given that what I actually wrote was “You can’t just deny them access based on the fact that you don’t like their email provider of choice”, I think it’s aged pretty well to be honest. We appear to be saying “Go Away” to everyone now, whatever their email address…

that it doesn’t also have an option

One of the design goals of Beast was to write a functional forum in the least number of lines of code possible. As such, a lot of the niceties are simply non-existent.

We appear to be saying “Go Away” to everyone now

I did this a couple of weeks ago on my forum. Spamming isn’t possible because everybody needs to be approved, but it was getting annoying deleting the ones that made it past the StopForumSpam lookup and the test questions…

I can only imagine that “AI” is just going to exacerbate this problem.