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 Post subject: Dumping old PC games...
PostPosted: November 2nd, 2013, 1:42 pm 
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Location: Australia
So over the years I have acquired some undumped pc88, pc98 and x1 games from auction sites. How hard is it to dump this stuff? Would you necessarily need the original systems to do it, or could USB drives serve the purpose?

Everything is on 5.25 floppies except for a pc98 game on a 3.5 inch. Could the 3.5 inch pc98 floppies just be copied from any 3.5 inch drive and then used in an emulator?

How about the 5 inch floppies? Are there any differences in PC88 and X1 floppies?


Hopefully we can all help to make some progress here... While some new dumps for FM Towns and X68000 have come through over the years, it seems there hasn't really been any new dumps of PC88, PC98 and X1 games since the 90's. While a lot of games have been dumped, there are still plenty of commercial titles missing, and of course a tonne of doujins.


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PostPosted: November 2nd, 2013, 3:36 pm 
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Joined: January 9th, 2007, 9:57 pm
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Location: Russia
Dumping 3.5 inch (pc98/dosv/fm-towns/x68000) diskettes is very simple. Enough to have the usb floppy disk drive work on “Floppy 3 mode”. To create an image, you can use DiskExplorer.
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013937/editdisk/

more about “Floppy 3 mode”
http://www.gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id= ... 5_floppies

For dumping and writing 3.5 inch diskettes I bought for 1000 yen Sony Vaio PCGA-UFD5.

Image

For writing 3.5 inch diskettes I was unable to properly use modern 3.5 inch diskettes.
Image
Normally writing only retro floppy.

Twice I have had problems with the dumping cd disk on the modern dvd-rom driver. Pulled out my ancient nec CD-ROM.

Dumping 5.25 floppies well detailed peter_j

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1355&start=75


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PostPosted: November 5th, 2013, 5:08 am 
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Location: Australia
Thank you for the information al32gabby!

Is anyone here confident in dumping the 5 inch floppies? I will be happy to pay the shipping to people to get the floppies dumped. Not sure who I can trust apart from al32gabby and peter_j though, some of the games are extremely valuable.

I have some more undumped games on the way too.


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PostPosted: November 5th, 2013, 2:58 pm 
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Maybe there are some preservation projects in your neighborhood, so you don't have to ship them too far away? The MSPP for example focuses mostly on the Microbee and other Australian computers, but perhaps somebody there could help you. Or you could try getting in contact with the MESS team, maybe pm Etabeta for possible help.


Last edited by Starscream the 2nd on November 5th, 2013, 4:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: November 5th, 2013, 3:57 pm 
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My experience so far using a PC is that I have been able to dump 5.25in PC-98 floppies in many instances. I have not tried many commercial games but I did manage to get that dump of XZR that delikea cracked for us, but others won't read. I have had ZERO success with PC-88 floppies, even using a 360K drive.

I suspect that one needs to find someone with a real PC-98 with 5.25in drives and using Mahalito to dump PC-88 floppies. Alternatively, that Kryoflux controller claims to read PC-88 disks, but it is quite expensive, and many of the PC-88 disks I have have bad mould. Maybe when I am feeling not so poor... :wink:

Maybe someone else can give some advice on PC-88 dumping.

Dumping floppies is quite nerve-wracking - will it read, or won't it read LOL! In general, on the PC-98 and PC-AT side, I find 5.25in disks far more likely to read than 3.25in ones.

One strange but good thing with Omniflop - it claims not to handle USB drives, but happily gives good dumps off my 3-mode USB drives, as long as you let it use "unspecified format".


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PostPosted: November 6th, 2013, 6:56 am 
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Shou from Japan is a possibility for helping out here because he has all the old computers (even an x1). Actually having the computers is a good first step because my discs can be at least checked normally first to see what actually works (never know which floppies could be dead considering I have no systems myself). No idea if he would have interest in trying to dump stuff though if he doesn't know how to do it or doesn't have the enthusiasm at the moment.

I will get myself a bit more organized first with what I can acquire before I start trying to bug people about dumping stuff like this. In the meantime peter_j or anyone else if you make lots of progress with dumping 5 inch floppies and feel much more confident do let me know :lol:

If theres any interest I can make a post showing the undumped stuff I have along with photo's.


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PostPosted: November 7th, 2013, 5:20 am 
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I thought USB drives can't read exotic formats?

For 3.5in disks, the most reliable solution I've found is NFDMake on a real PC-9801. It has a good error checking/skipping algorithm.
NFDMake was written by the T98-Next author. It's a part of T98-Next Tool. Download here: http://www.geocities.jp/t98next/download.html
NFD file format is documented here: http://www.geocities.jp/t98next/dev.html
You can convert NFD files with VFIC.

But dumping the disk is only the first step. You still need to crack the protection on most retail games. If you have a good dump, you can usually crack the protection in an emulator with a tool like Wizard.

Here's a good overview in Japanese:
http://retropc.net/yui/np2inst/dump/betaimage.html
http://retropc.net/yui/np2inst/dump/abnorimage.html

I don't have much experience dumping 5.25in disks, but many existing PC-8801 images were created using MAKE_HD on a PC-9801. MAKE_HD sounds like a hard disk dumping tool, but it's actually a floppy imaging program. MAKE_HD is bundled with P88SR, a PC-8801 emulator that runs on PC-9801.
Download here: http://www1.plala.or.jp/aoto/pc88emu.htm

The other best option is DITT by the author of M88. DITT runs in IBM PC/AT compatible MS-DOS, so if you have an old PC lying around, you can use that. You just need a good 5 inch drive. DITT also works for FM-7 disks.
Download here: http://retropc.net/cisc/m88/dl/

Macaw, I can dump 3.5in disks no problem. I also have a couple of spare 5.25in PC-8801 drives, so I could try to set up a DITT station. PM me if you want to talk.


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PostPosted: November 7th, 2013, 5:46 am 
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On the USB drive issue, all I have done is read PC-98 floppies at 1.2 and 1.44MB size, which the 3-mode drive handles fine, especially with Omniflop.

About DITT - I have had no luck, even having built 2 pretty old PCs and tried various PC 5.25 drives. Are there some tricks you could share?


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PostPosted: November 7th, 2013, 11:38 am 
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DITT station is up and running! Here is the first dump: http://www.sendspace.com/file/tvf1mt
edit: CRC errors on tracks 33-34. Hopefully the problem is with the disk and not the drive.

My 5 inch drives are all 2D though, so I can only read 2D (360KB) disks. I'll try to find a 2HD drive sometime.

peter_j wrote:
On the USB drive issue, all I have done is read PC-98 floppies at 1.2 and 1.44MB size, which the 3-mode drive handles fine, especially with Omniflop.

Yes but some protected disks don't use the standard 1.2MB (1024 bytes x 8 sectors x 77 tracks x 2 sides) and 1.44MB (512 bytes x 18 sectors x 80 tracks x 2 sides) formats. I was under the impression that USB drives can't read those. (Actually it may be more of a Windows problem than a USB problem.)
Maybe some of your unreadable 3.5 inch disks are just using a non-standard format?

Quote:
About DITT - I have had no luck, even having built 2 pretty old PCs and tried various PC 5.25 drives. Are there some tricks you could share?

Check your jumpers! Make sure the pin 34 behavior is set to Disk Change, not Ready.
Also check your floppy cable. At first I couldn't read A: and thought my drive had died, but the drive was actually mapped to B: because I was using a straight floppy cable.


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PostPosted: November 7th, 2013, 2:15 pm 
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I have only read standard disks via USB - I never claimed to read funny-sectored ones. The point I was trying to make was that Omniflop, which claims not to work with USB drives, does do so albeit on standard disks. Apologies if I created the wrong impression.


I'll check out what you say about DITT. I do have the cables right as I can read PC DOS 360k disks via DOS. Thanks for the disk-change tip. Looks like my report card is "could do better".


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PostPosted: November 7th, 2013, 10:56 pm 
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peter_j wrote:
I have only read standard disks via USB - I never claimed to read funny-sectored ones. The point I was trying to make was that Omniflop, which claims not to work with USB drives, does do so albeit on standard disks. Apologies if I created the wrong impression.

Sorry, I was mostly responding to al32gabby's comment. If a disk keeps giving read errors in a USB floppy drive, it might read correctly on a Shugart-connected drive, or on a PC-9801. This is exactly what happened to me with some PC-9801 protected disks.
Thanks for the tip about Omniflop, that's good to know.

BTW, has anyone tried SAMdisk? I hear it's excellent.

Quote:
I'll check out what you say about DITT. I do have the cables right as I can read PC DOS 360k disks via DOS. Thanks for the disk-change tip. Looks like my report card is "could do better".

Another thing I just thought of: you might have to manually specify 2HD to read 1.2MB disks with DITT. Use the -h flag.
DITT r -h a: file.d88

The motherboard BIOS must also support 3-mode.


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PostPosted: November 19th, 2013, 2:15 pm 
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Thanks everyone for the info, kobushi I may contact you in the future for the 3.5 inch stuff if I don't get around to those myself.

I was also contacted by Superdeadite who said he could dump the 5 inch discs with his x68000, thats looking like the best option so far.


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PostPosted: November 19th, 2013, 10:25 pm 
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Can you post the titles along with photos Macaw? All this talk about them just feeds my curiousity :wink:


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PostPosted: November 28th, 2013, 12:23 pm 
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I recently got a twitter account that I've been posting info and pics on various obscurities or unreleased games.

Its here: https://twitter.com/Macaw45

I just posted info on an absurdly rare X1 Takeru release I managed to get a while back.


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PostPosted: November 29th, 2013, 10:40 pm 
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Location: Salad Kingdom
That's pretty cool, bit wasted on twitter though. Ever thought of making a blog or website?


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