Zelanites fails to allocate memory

[sjnewbury]

I recently bought a GreaseWeazle to archive my old Acorn floppies, and was quite excited to find my original Zelanites disk. This is apparently unobtainium from online software archives, probably due to the copy protection and MicroPower withdrawing from the game market the same year. It seems it was once included in the MESS Software List collection, but presumably dropped because it didn't work when run from a sector based floppy image.

I haven't been able to run this game since I upgraded my A3000 to RISC OS 3, so I didn't expect it to work with RISC OS 3 ROMs under emulation, which it, of course, doesn't. Unfortunately, when using a HFE floppy image it doesn't run with Arculator using RISC OS 2 either. The presents the loading screen, then aborts with a message saying it wasn't able to free enough memory, not matter how much is allocated. The code itself appears to be non-relocatable, so I guess it is trying to use a memory location which is available on real hardware, but not under the emulator..?

I have got it working under MESS (mostly ok), using the MFI floppy format. The MAME HFE loader doesn't want to read it so I haven't been able to compare running the same image on both emulators. If I use ADF with MESS it drops to the supervisor prompt after the loading screen, which is what I remember happening back in the day when I tried to back it up. Arculator fails with the same error regardless of the floppy image format.

Any thoughts?

[Sophira]

Arculator v2.2 has recently been released with support for HFEv3 images; if you were using the v2.1 release download before, it might be worth trying again with Arculator v2.2 and converting your floppy into an HFEv3 image and see if that works!

[sjnewbury]

HFEv3 makes no difference. It's not actually getting as far as the copy protection check. I've actually got the game working by using the !ZZ and !zzd files from the "Play it Again Sam 3" disc (after decompressing them). That has the advantage of being compatible with RISC OS 3 and even working from HostFS since it doesn't contain the aforementioned copy protection, but high scores aren't getting written to disc for some reason.

It's a bit unfortunate the legitimate copy isn't working "as is". I wonder if it tries to use an address which is writable RAM on original hardware running RISC OS 2, but not when using RISC OS 3 or Arculator? Could there be anything like that?

The good news is, except for writing the high scores, the hacked game works fantastically well under Arculator.