In December 2019 I wrote about bypassing the copy-protection in some old RiscOS educational games I played in the early to mid 90s.
Since then, I’ve received occasional requests to provide copies of them. People clearly have fond memories of them and they’re somewhat difficult to find – I imagine schools simply threw them away with the Acorn machines they ran on.
Graciously, the original authors of Time Detectives and Aztecs have given their consent for me to make these available.
The easiest way to play these games is using the Open-Source RPCEmu emulator. I’ve packaged a copy of this, with a ROM from 4Corn, with modified copies of the games.
- Download this zip file , containing RPCEmu, RiscOS ROM and the games
- Extract to somewhere (e.g. your desktop)
- Open the extracted folder and double-click RPCEmu-Interpreter.exe
- From the bar at the bottom, click HostFS
- Double-Click !Fonts , you will get a message confirming fonts have been installed. Press space or click the mouse-button to continue
- Double-Click either !Aztecs or !Victorian to launch either game, you will notice that the game doesn’t start – but an additional icon appears on the bottom bar. Click it to begin.
- Either game can be quit by pressing CTRL-Q on the keyboard.
There are some issues, the most notable of which can be worked around by setting your clock back to pre 2000.
If anyone is particularly keen for modified adf files rather than RPCEmu, get in touch and I’ll provide those also.
Thanks to Simon and Adam for allowing me to make these available again!