Simon the Sorcerer CD version

I’m trying to run the game on Raspberry Pi with RISC OS 5.24. I bought it on ebay from four-d-pi-shop, the ebay arm of CJE Micro‘s & 4D. The CD contains a demo version !STS_CDDEM and a directory called FULLVSN, which apparently contains the full version of the game.

Because it’s an Archimedes title, I tried to run it in ArcEm. I copied the contents of the CD to a hostfs directory and tried to run it from there. The game’s icon appears on the Icon Bar, but when I click it I get a black screen with a message “Not a runtime database”. No matter if I try to run a demo version (!STS_CDDEM), or a full version (after replacing the files inside !STS_CDDEM with the contents of FULLVSN) I always get the same error. Other games, like Wolfenstein 3D or Dune 2, work fine with my ArcEm setup.

I tried to get help from the shop, but they wrote to me: “Unfortunately we don’t have any experience with ArcEm, so it might be best to ask on the ArcEm section of the RISC OS Open forum”. I can see ADFFS supporting the floppy version, but it’s no option for me since I don’t have a computer with a floppy disk.

Is there a way to run Simon the Sorcerer CD version on Raspberry Pi? Does anyone here have this version too and knows how to run it?

I have the CD and long time ago I have it running on my Beagle but I not remember how, sorry. I will look at next few days. Not sure witch of the Emulators. But I remember I use a IsoImage and CDFaker…
In 2013 (?) I had contact to the programmer…

It could be a * command that’s abbreviated causing the issue….or…

I copied the contents of the CD to a hostfs directory and tried to run it from there.

I’ve yet to look at the CD version of the game, but I suspect you need to run an installer from the floppy disks that accompany the CD. You’d need to image the CD to ISO and the floppies as ADF and use CDFaker and ADFFS to mount them within ArcEm. You can use a PC to do the imaging, I’m lead to believe OmniFloppy can read FileCore floppies.

I’ll take a look at it next week, it was submitted to the project some years ago but I’ve yet to test it.

Note : the ‘floppy discs’ are 800Kb files which ADFFS can mount.

ISTR Simon the Sorcerer being one of the games that ScummVM can run – if so you could (I assume) copy the relevant data from the CD to the relevant place within ScummVM and use that.

Thank you all for your help, guys! Finally, I managed to run the game with ScummVM from riscos.info, and it works like a charm!

That’s a very out of date version – version 2.0.0 is available from the official site.