Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

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equinox
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Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by equinox »

Hi cuties. It's me, Equinox, who used to post on comp.sys.sinclair in the year minus 700. I'm pretty drunk. Who wants a hug?

If anyone needs the background: Odd Job Eddie is a flip-screen platform game that shipped with the Spectrum +2. It plays a bit like Jet Set Willy, with you moving between rooms to collect objects; BUT it was actually an illegally plagiarised version of an earlier game, Pyramania, and as such doesn't play properly (see my own map and notes on WoS) and has various weird glitches.

As I said, this game shipped with the +2 and was noted as being 128K-only. You can in fact reliably crash the game by loading it in 48K mode and going left from the start room and then falling down the hole (which should take you to another room, but in 48K mode causes the game to die -- in various ways -- I actually remember as a kid doing this and seeing the garbage text "NEXT ?" [with a random keyword] and thinking that the game was somehow asking itself what should come next, what was missing. How ****ing cyberpunk).

Anyway, WoS offers a 48K version of this game "OddJobEddie48.z80.zip" which crashes in the exact same way if you do what I described, so I don't believe there is a working 48K version at all -- even though Pyramania (IIRC) was a 48K game. What's going on here? I really hope there's a scandalous trick in the code to make it crash on purpose for no reason on 48K machines, like what Microsoft did when they detected DR-DOS.
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StooB
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by StooB »

The title screen 'copyright' date of 1985, which is actually a year earlier than the two known Strobe releases, suggests that there was a 48k version.

My theory is that IJK got worried after they were caught ripping off Spellbound with Crimebusters, so they pulled the release of Odd Job Eddie and slipped it out later in that Witchfiend/Eddie double pack.

I wonder who got his stuff, The answer might be there: https://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/ ... -contracts
equinox
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by equinox »

StooB thanks for your comments. Doesn't this suggest that the archived stuff is wrong and we should remove any "48K version"?
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StooB
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by StooB »

The problem is that there's an unexplained 48k z80 snapshot for it.

This is one of the idiosyncrasies of the old WoS database. Nobody questioned why someone who had the equipment to create digital copies of tapes didn't own a scanner or camera.

Collectors have spent years looking for mythical Hit Squad re-releases of Firefly and Legend of Kage that WoS claimed existed - all because of some mislabelled tzx files.
equinox
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by equinox »

Right but isn't it sort of ****ing immediately trivially obvious to anyone who used a Spectrum for half a day that this "snapshot" is a *demonstrably* non-functional mess that may have been produced for a shovelware CD in 1994 or something? If it doesn't even work on a 48 then it isn't a legitimate 48 snapshot. What recourse do we have here?

To clarify, in light of your previous post: if there is evidence that there *was* a 48 version, then fine, but archives should not be publishing a definitely non-48 version under the guise of a 48 one, that is extremely stupid.
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StooB
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by StooB »

equinox wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:11 am What recourse do we have here?

To clarify, in light of your previous post: if there is evidence that there *was* a 48 version, then fine, but archives should not be publishing a definitely non-48 version under the guise of a 48 one, that is extremely stupid.
I've added the 48K version to my list of "things that don't exist" that will be posted in the bugs thread soon.
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Einar Saukas
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by Einar Saukas »

In next ZXDB update, this game will be marked as "128K only". The 48K snapshot will be marked as "corrupted" and removed from the listing. OK?
equinox
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by equinox »

Sweet. Thanks!
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StooB
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Re: Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility

Post by StooB »

Einar Saukas wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 11:12 am In next ZXDB update, this game will be marked as "128K only". The 48K snapshot will be marked as "corrupted" and removed from the listing. OK?
Original publication will need to be "As part of a compilation".

and also...

Comparing the Witchfiend + Odd Job Eddie compilation with the Ian Botham + Superfile compilation (both were bundled with +2 machines), they have identical copyright warnings and even the same font on the cassette labels, which strongly suggests that Witchfiend + Odd Job Eddie was actually published by Tynesoft rather than Strobe:

Image
Image

Image
Image

The machine type should be 128K for both compilations and the year should be 1986 for them and Superfile's own entry too.
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