The Arcade Adventure Design Kit by Christopher Dewhurst, author of Cronosoft's Acorn titles Egghead in Space and Weenies ... has now been released!

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/aadk

The Arcade Adventure Design Kit is available across almost all the Acorn family - from the BBC Micro and Electron, up to the latest RISC OS machines.

You can start by checking out the sample adventure Castle Blacknight, and then go on to design your own creation with The Arcade Adventure Design Kit's complete set of game editors.

Please leave feedback in this forum, and feel free to ask questions or swap hints and tips for other users of the kit here.

Cheers,

Sam.

I tried this with Elkulator and the CASTLEBLACKB.SSD example game, and it appeared to hang after the title screen. Any ideas?

Works for me, so long as the Plus 3, DFS and ADFS are all enabled. Use SHIFT+D+BREAK to boot the disc (so SHIFT+D+F12 on a PC with the default Elkulator key configuration).

If you disable ADFS, the font pointer pokes in line 50 of the loader program BCBLOAD seem to have a problem. Removing the ?&369=&13 from the middle of that line, will allow the game to run but the some of the fonts are messed up which stops it being very playable.

I'll refer you to section "10.4 Castle Blacknight Programming Notes" of the copious PDF AADK manual for more detail on what that line in the loader is doing.

Sam.

I just tried running AADK on my Iyonix and despite the fact the program appeared to be running, it said it could not display the mode being used by AADK in both the programs and playing Castle Blackheart game too. Do I need a special mode to run this on my Iyonix ? What mode does this run in, I was expecting it to be in a desktop window.

I got the BBC ssd image running fine on BeebIT but 6502em crashed after the title page for some reason, The game looks good, very typical traditional BBC arcade adventure and a good showing of what you can achieve with this kit, but it was unbearably slow moving the character about this could be down to BeebIt just being slow.

Hopefully I can get this up and running natively on the Iyonix and then have a proper play with it.

I'm afraid I can't help you with the Iyonix specific issues - though I've directed Christopher to this topic to see if he can help.

As for the speed, I have to say that it is also noticable in the PC emulators - the games themselves are generated in BBC BASIC, which is one reason why the kit works across almost the whole family of Acorn machines - the trade-off for this is speed. Christopher did speculate that a machine code version could make a future commercial venture, but it will almost certainly depend on what the response to the BASIC version is.

Sam.

I should of mentioned that i'm using a LCD monitor, SyncMaster 152V. I hope it can work with the Iyonix, as I would like to have a go at this sometime when I have some spare time and see what I can come up with .

I have plenty of screen modes available so am surprised it didn't work, I might put the question to one of the Acorn newsgroups.

I suspect that the AADK is using a screen mode which isn't available on the Iyonix hence in the blank screen.

I still cannot get any of the AADK working with 6502erm on RISC OS, it displays the title page of Castle Blacknight OK but then press a key and get a blank screen and nothing else, same with the suite of programmes. However it is fine on BeebIT which suggests to me another one in long line of programs which won't run on 6502em but will on BeebIT.

I got the Archimedes version of Castle Blacknight running on !A310emu on my Iyonix fine, it was painfully slow but it worked. So I suspect early RISC OS machines will be OK with thei program, but it would appear later ones such as the Iyonix aren't.

Also I think a machine code version of AADK would be excellent if it makes the produced games quicker, then I would be interested in it.

Hi Guys sorry for long delay in getting here - non computer things keep coming up !

Now, when I was working on the Iyonix version of Castle Blacknight, I had a Proview monitor and it was happy to run in MODE 10 (the 256 colour equivalent of Mode 2) BUT I with my new monitor doing MODE 10 takes you TO MODE 28. So I suspect it may be something to do with monitors and I don't know enough yet about monitor definition files to solve the problem. I'll ask on the Iyonix mailing list.

Not sure what the issues are with 6502em. Matt do you have a copy of 6502em I could 'borrow'?

Matt: just had another thought. Are you able to temporarily use an Acorn AKF monitor definition (e.g. AKF92 from the !Boot>Screen>Monitor type menu) for running !CastBlack?

I just tried running AADK on my Iyonix running an MDF of Acorn AKF85, and there was partial success, certainly a screen
display is now there, which proves that it was missing the correct mode settings, however the screen display is broken up and not usuable at all, I don't think I have an AKF92 definition file, I might have, where would I find one?

Also I noticed that the speed of the Castle Blacknight is significantly faster on the iyonix that it was on the BBC emulation, and it's at a level which makes the game playable.

So some progress but not quite there yet.

In reply to my previous post, i've found a directory of loads of old Acorn monitor definition files, I tried AKF92 as suggested, but it gave the same display at AKF85 , it seems the higher the resolution the display is shown but broken up, I tried AKF50 and got a blank screen.

Have you tried Eric Rucker's MDF?

Not yet, but i'll give it a go thanks. I think I should be able to display these modes, just need the correct MDF.

Any chance you could send me the MDFs you were using that displayed the AADK on your Iyonix? it might work on mine.