Tower of Babel Forum

Dr. · Administrator Messages: 310 Location: Saarbrücken

The question for many of us was, or is: How to get ToB to run on an Amiga emulator?

ADF disk images are freely available on the net (but please remember that you need to have purchased an original copy of the game to be able to legally use this!), as are Amiga emulators.

I recommend using WinUAE (available from http://www.winuae.net/ ), as WinFellow, at least the version I have, is a bit unreliable when it comes to accessing disks.

Insert the virtual ToB disk, and hit the go button.
You will soon realize that the program does not recognize the ADF file as the original game disk; this means you cannot access tower groups beyond the first one. Which is highly annoying.
There exists, however, a second ADF disk, which retains the original copy protection.

So: Load the cracked disk and THEN insert the original (second) disk in order to progress higher.

Unfortunately this forum has a size limit of 500 kb for attached files. If you need it, you can ask any of the list members, I think. Or ask Andrew (Artinum) right away - he has some amusing stories to tell on how he got that disk himself.

Z
--
"Who said that? Confucius?"
"I say that."

Dr. · Administrator Messages: 310 Location: Saarbrücken

A VERY short how-do-I-get-this-bloody-thing-to-run-manual for WinUAE, in German:

http://members.fortunecity.com/widi2000/amigainstr.htm

Z
--
"Who said that? Confucius?"
"I say that."

Artinum · Zapper Messages: 184 Location: United Kingdom

To save receiving hundreds of emails asking about it, perhaps I should explain my bizarre tale here. (Anyone wanting a copy of the uncracked, fully operational disk, please contact me - eventually I'll try to find a way to set up a quick webpage somewhere and you can download it direct. Meanwhile we have email...)

Like many others, I spent some considerable time searching the internet for a copy of ToB on ADF. I found several. They are all the same file - a cracked version that the game doesn't recognise as the game disk and therefore one that won't let you past the first group of towers. Or change your display panel style, come to that (try neon! It's weird but cool!).

Then one day I found a website (http://emu.hut.ru/) which mentioned Tower of Babel and ADF in the same page. Said page was gigantic and all in Russian; too big to go through the free translation page I found online. Paying for a translation would have cost by the word (uuurk!). But the truth was evident - this site was selling CD-Roms with emulator files on them for a variety of platforms, five CD's of which were for the Amiga. One of these five contained Tower of Babel.

Thus I made some calculations and found that, with postage and all, the cost was about eight American dollars (or about five pounds). Now, how to pay them? A bank transfer would cost me £25, and I wasn't sure I had all the details I'd need. The site mentioned Western Union transfers. I went for one of those. I discovered that there was a minimum payment I could send, so I ended up ordering four of the five CDs when I was only after one... oh well!

The disks took a long time to arrive. Eventually they did, and hardly daring to breath, I looked at them. Many games were duplicated, if for example they were cracked by different hackers or came from different sources. Tower of Babel appeared to be one of these, as there were two disk images. One was entitled "Tower of Babel (Pete Cooke) [cr. cortex]" or similar, and turned out to be... the same old file. I was crushed. The second image was referred to as a 'data disk' which I reasoned was a save disk that got bundled with it.

Then a moment of madness struck me. I tested the cracked disk again, changing the control panel style to get it to ask for the game disk, and then I inserted the other one. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do this. When it worked and I found I could access the other towers and so on, I grinned so wide the top of my head fell off. It rolled under the coffee table and it took me an hour to find it.

Now I've typed too much.

Artinum · Zapper Messages: 184 Location: United Kingdom

Ah! I have done the deed...

You can download both cracked and original ADFs from this site:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/mergles/tob.htm

Enjoy!

Artinum.

(PS: Don't ask me what 'mergles' means...)

Dr. · Administrator Messages: 310 Location: Saarbrücken

Good work. Just the thing I've been looking for in vain for, uh, ever since I first accessed the net.

Zitat: Artinum

(PS: Don't ask me what 'mergles' means...)

(Lowers hand again)

Z
--
"Who said that? Confucius?"
"I say that."