Playing classic games on ArmX6

I had an A5000 back in the day and now I have an amazing ArmX6.

I want to play classic games like Arc Elite, Chocks Away etc. – Is there an easy guide to getting them to run?

Is there a good up to date Z-Machine interpreter as well?

Thanks in advance.

I want to play classic games like Arc Elite, Chocks Away etc. – Is there an easy guide to getting them to run?

Those old games largely relied on some feature/quirk of the old machines so work to modify and support their quirks has been done by the admirable Jon Abbott

Essentially you’re looking for ADFFS which you will find details of on the Archimedes Software Preservation Project web site.

Latest release is possibly this one (v2.73) referenced here

Hope that helps – not a game player myself.

For Z-Machine, there is Zip2000 by Kevin Bracey. Now maintained by Christ Gransdon I think. See https://www.riscosports.co.uk/emulation.html

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/frotzpi1.zip

You absolutely want ADFFS, as Steve says.

If you get stuck, post here or on the JASPP site.

Thanks for all the helpful advice. I guess my monitor didn’t like the screen modes.

However, on a more gloomy note my Armx6 is now dead. It powers up and the cd-rom spins up but no picture, no boot nothing. Very depressing.

However, on a more gloomy note my Armx6 is now dead. It powers up and the cd-rom spins up but no picture, no boot nothing. Very depressing.

Don’t give up yet. My ARMX6 did this intermittently a few weeks ago and I never found a cure, but it seems to have stopped doing it. (That should jinx it.)

Can you ping it from other machines on the network? If so, it’s booted but not giving a video output, or the monitor is not accepting what it supplies. The monitor might say “no signal” or “out of range”. The latter would indicate that there is a video signal.

If it really is doing nothing, talk to Andrew. A processor board swap might be needed, and in that case your data should all still be intact.

If it is screen based then perhaps overriding the boot sequence by doing a shift boot or hitting the escape key anumber of times may help.

If the CD is spinning up this may just be the power on initialisation.

If the partition on the boot the system SDCard drive, SDFS::1, has been reformated or corrupted or the CMOS corrupted then this could cause the issue seen.

It is a little fiddly to get to but putting if B Clark has a spare and another RISC OS machine they could recover it or alternatively use a Linux/Windows machine to write the image.

I would suggest a quick call to RComp if nervous as it may also help to stop digging a further hole as well :-)

It powers up and the cd-rom spins up but no picture, no boot nothing. Very depressing.

Could be a simple as a problem with the display connection, or even power to the display (I want a penny for every one of those I’ve seen over the years)

Could be a simple as a problem with the display connection,

Yes, I’ve noticed my Beagle refuses to boot if my display isn’t connected and powered up. I had hoped to run the display from one of the USB ports (it’s a little 7" panel) but the port power is turned on during boot, only it doesn’t ever get that far.
Plugging the display into an independent power supply, all is fine.

<shrug>

Thanks again for the advice. I am beginning to think the board got bricked by ADFFS. I even ran the program with the Boot Floppy option for disk images but its the only thing I can think of since I powered it down shortly after and that is when it refused to boot back up.

I reached out to Andrew for advice so hopefully he has a magic cure. My Pi boots fine with the same screen, the ArmX6 doesn’t even wake it up. I am hoping there is some way to flash it and bring it back. Otherwise I either ship it back to the UK for repair or write off the $900 I spent to get a ‘flagship’ device to run RisCOS on as a poor choice and re-purpose the case for something else. If ADFFS was the cause then I am truly flabbergasted that the setup is so fragile.

There is no way ADFFS will brick your ARMX6.

The worst I can think of is if you start running some o!d games without using ‘boot floppy’, so you end up with various modules unplugged.

If you allow the machine to boot then press F12, do you hear a beep if you press CTRL-G? This would suggest the machine is working, you just can’t see a picture.

I don’t think your board will be fried more likely you have corrupted something like the SDCard ROM image or CMOS on it.

Did you try hitting escape as it boots up?

If you don’t hear a beep as Richard says then it may be the sdcard is corrupted and it isn’t booting or the SSD is corrupt/faulty.

If you are confident then get a copy of the latest ROm from the ROOL site downloads Wandaboard section.

If not then await Andrews help.

I note you say you have a Pi so I will assume it is running RISC OS.

Put a spare micro sdcard in an adaptor and attach a card reader to your Pi.

Make sure you know which is your card before the next step , hint watch which new scsi drive icons appear on the Pi’s desktop.

Unzip the contents of the download and run SDCreate and follow the instructions to install the ROM image and CMOS.

Dismount the newly created SDCard and take it out of it’s carrier.

Open up the ARMX6 case and look for the SSD cable and unplug it and try to see it the ARMX6 boots up.

If not power down and look for the SDCard which is on the front of the board when looking at the case from the Cd drive end. It is the bottom SDCard if I remember rightly and is a little fiddly to get out.

Replace it with your newly created SdCard.

Replace the SSD cable and now repower back on.

You should be running a ROOL version of the ROM.

You can now install a RComp version of the ROM by getting the image from the site mentioned in your manual, unzipping it and running OSUpgrade.

Beta 17b is the latest.

I always keep a spare formatted SDCard just in case of issues but never had any he says touching lots of wood.

Good luck.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. The SD card plugged into the Wandboard is actually the backup SD as I could see the backups for Safestore on it. I am thinking the machine boots from the larger SSD near the front normally. I will make a boot image later and try using it in the slot on the Wandboard.

*edit: So I disconnected the SSD and tried booting with the wandboard image on a microSD that I created with SDcreate. The program just used the ROM and nothing else. All I could see on the SD card was a fat partition with a readme file. But per the file the Boot is invisible to the filer so I figured we must be good. So the result was No boot. No display. Not even caps lock on the keyboard is working. To me that says dead board. I may be wrong and I will await what Andrew comes up with.

There are two Micro SDCard slots on the motherboard, one is for booting from and the other is just applications etc.

You did change the Micro SdCard in bottom of the two slots as only one allows system booting.

If you did then it looks more like a serious issue.

Good luck.

Just wanted to add that the positions of the two sd card slots varies on the motherboard depending on the board revisions. On the later rev D boards, the slots are on opposite sides. On the earlier ones, they are one-above-the-other. Mr Clark’s machine was, I think, around the change-over time, so I’m still trying to establish which he’s got, so as to give the correct advice.

Email support is on-going, so I’ll be detailing this privately. All being well we’ll be able to get it sorted.

For future readers, note that the OS card slot is not the one with safestore backups, and the board cannot boot off that slot. The OS card must be in the other. That is the only port that will boot the wandboard. If the card becomes dislodged or corrupted, or if CMOS becomes corrupted, the fault described above could occur. There is a small chance of board failure, but it is rare enough that I am struggling to recall an instance of it.

HI Andrew

Thanks for the clarification about the different versions and hopefully your support will be the added bit to get it back up and running for Mr Clarke.

Thanks again everyone for your continued support. I took another look this morning after the mention of two microSD slots because I could only see the one. Turns out there was one on the opposite site. Andrew very smartly had the second one poking out the back of the case. I hadn’t noticed it before. I popped out the card and rewrote the image and to cut a long story short I am posting this reply on my ArmX6 much to my relief.

So ADFFS does work but the screens are garbled. I assume I need to load a suitable monitor def file? The ArmX6 does come with !AcornMode which boots a 3.1 desktop and that has some games. Would it be better to try the disks with that?

I know the Pi has a built in upscaler that makes this whole process much easier but I would prefer to run my old favorites on my main machine. It was one of the reasons I bought it as opposed to hunting down an A5000.

Once again many thanks to everyone for all the helpful suggestions. Your kindness makes the covid lockdown much more bearable!

Turns out there was one on the opposite site.

So given what Andrew said you must have a Revision D board as the others are on the same side.

Glad you goot it working.

AcornModes works well for a lot of games and you can also try ArchiEmu by Jan De Boer.

Take care

Doug