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PostPosted: May 31st, 2015, 12:23 pm 
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Posts: 18
Hi all,

I am new here but this looks to be a great place for help with Japanese PC platforms. :D

I am looking for some advice. I received a Kryoflux kit this week and hooked it up to a 5.25" floppy drive I have (it's an old Amstrad drive but works great). However running DTC -c2 in Kryoflux presents just 41 tracks in calibration. So now the search is on for a suitable drive for the pile of disks I have. Can anyone help me find an 80 track floppy drive, or recommend which one to get so I can take these disks and dump them?

Thanks everyone, I hope I can get these dumped so I can hopefully get more disks and then dump more in future. :)


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PostPosted: May 31st, 2015, 1:18 pm 
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Location: South Africa
Hi and welcome here

If you are near any computer shop that has a lot of old junk, or an electronics recycler, you might find one there. Or some old granny getting rid of an XT or AT. Failing that, you can normally get on eBay I think, but people ask a lot for them. If you have an old Amstrad drive you are possibly from the UK or Europe, so eBay.co.uk might do.

The ones I have had the best results from are TEAC FD-55GFR ones. They do vary ( head alignments I think ) so you might want to obtain a couple. Be sure to clean the heads with isopropyl alcohol before allowing a dirty head to wreck your disks.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=FD-55GFR&_sacat=0

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=teac+floppy+drive+5.25&_frs=1


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PostPosted: May 31st, 2015, 1:35 pm 
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Hi Peter,

Yes I am in Ireland. I got an Amstrad drive as a freebie from a kind person on another forum. The drive is in excellent shape, it's just a shame it presents 41 tracks with dtc -c2.

Those TEAC drives would be great but buying from the USA on eBay is a nightmare thanks to that global repackaging service and import tax. Glad to know what drive to look at though, I was almost going to get this:

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/171801317005

The person that gave me the Amstrad drive, also threw in a cleaning disk, and I have a huge bottle of isopropyl already so that's a good start for when I do find the right drive. The disks I want to dump are from an old magazine called Login. It's weird, it mentions 9801, X68000, FM Towns and MS DOS on the cover sleeves, so I wonder if these are some odd multi format I need to dump in a specific way?

Once I can get these done, I have some X68000 stuff I would like to dump next. :)

Thanks everyone for your help!


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PostPosted: May 31st, 2015, 1:47 pm 
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Joined: June 7th, 2008, 8:51 am
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Location: South Africa
I have never seen a Cumana drive, so I can't advise on that.

I have never had an issue dumping LOGiN supplement disks. There is no special format - just use the PC98 standard. If you give it the extension .xdf for X68000 instead of .hdm, you'll be fine ( same format - straight dump, no headers or anything ).

There are more on the site, but here are some I did:

http://slt.retroprograms.com/5logins.html

Edit. I have seen a few funny X68K disks ( not LOGiN ones ), but not many.


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PostPosted: May 31st, 2015, 1:53 pm 
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Aha! That's your site! I emailed you yesterday. :D

I think you dumped some of the ones I have but I also have some you haven't dumped....I think. I have a bunch more coming from a different magazine for the X68000 and some other pieces, so hopefully it will help folks out. We share a similar hobby, gathering obscure stuff up and dumping it online. :lol:

I also have about 50 or so volumes of Backup Technique and Game Lab which I would like to get put out there. There are a LOT of programs published in it which would be great to put together and see what they do.

Well, I hope I can find a drive soon, else this Kryoflux kit is going to become and expensive paperweight! :lol:

EDIT: I just checked your site there against the disks I have. Mine are:

1991: 1,2,3,4
1992: 5,6,7,8
1993: 9


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PostPosted: June 15th, 2015, 7:12 pm 
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Finally! I got that TEAC drive you recommended. However non of the emulators read the HDM file. When I go to load it in an emulator it says How Many Files? 0-15? and if you enter a number, any number, it does nothing. Type in Load or something along those lines and it says 'no operand'.

I checked one of my disks alongside one of your dumps and you have them as DIM's? That's for the X68k though?

For the record the discs came up green and good the whole way through. The test disk I tried came out at around 1.25mb. These are my settings:

Image

Image

Image


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PostPosted: June 15th, 2015, 8:41 pm 
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So, I got your disks to work using a dos boot disk I found. Some of the games on your dumps don't appear to work (write errors etc?)?

The disk I dumped doesn't work. I press L to log to disk B and it won't read it. :(


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PostPosted: June 16th, 2015, 10:06 am 
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Location: South Africa
Hi

I suggest you put your dumps up somewhere and I'll take a look if you like. If you have one or two that are the same disks I dumped that would help.

Are these LOGiN disks? And Kryoflux GUI shows all green?

EDIT. Mostly the games or programs on the LOGiN disks are compressed so if you just try to run them you will get write errors as the disks are nearly full. You need to either copy to hard drive image or see if you can get the ( usually supplied ) .bat file to run.


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PostPosted: June 16th, 2015, 4:33 pm 
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Hi Peter

Yep all came up green per my screenshots. Though my filesizes are different. Mine are 1280. Yours are slightly smaller.

I will try running those batch files on your disks. Mine won't even read in the dos boot disk software. Happy to upload ny dumps for you to examine. Send me a PM?

I can't get an HDD to mount either. I followed a guide and did it through the Dos boot disk under Neko. But it won't mount.

Oh well. Hopefully we will get there soon!

:)


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PostPosted: June 16th, 2015, 7:35 pm 
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OK, here is a dump of a login disk from my collection. See what you think. I wish I could get my disks to dump properly. :(

Here is the dump, hosted on my Mega account:

FILE DOWNLOAD

Here are screenshots from the dump of this disk:

Image

Image


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PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 3:30 am 
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Location: South Africa
Please forgive me for being forgetful. You need to chop the dumps to the correct size.

Here is a utility I did to make it easier:

http://www.blackdiamond.co.za/temp/KryoChop.7z

It works only on files 1310720 bytes long, and is drag-and-drop. Please back up before using ( usual disclaimers about "own risk" apply ).

Your dump shows up fine once chopped, after booting the machine to DOS.

I'll try to help with a generic .hdi later ( 05h30 here and I don't have time now ).

EDIT. A very simple .hdi :

http://www.blackdiamond.co.za/temp/SmallDOS10.7z


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PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 4:29 am 
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Oh that is great! Thank you!

I will give that a try now (0530hrs here too oddly enough so just enough time before going to work!).

If this and the HDD image work I will try and dump the disks I have over the next couple of days. :D


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PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 4:38 am 
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It works!!!!!! I ran my HDM image through your superb Kryochop software and now the disk image reads perfectly!

Now to figure out the next step of running the software and/or installing it to the HDD! :lol:


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PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 6:59 am 
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One way of doing it - example. Boot off a copy of the .hdi, making it A:, then insert your disk. Note the copy command - changes name as the archive .exe is the same name as a file within the archive.

Image

Image

Image

Image


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PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 7:24 am 
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Super! I think i see what you mean. I did try earlier this morning. I copied the entire contents of the disk to a folder i created called Games on the root of C:. I then tried to run the game bat and exe files from the cmdline but just ran in to errors again.

I will try your solution tonight and hope it works. I am looking forward to dumping all of my disks soon!

Also i have some more stuff in the mail i am looking forward to. I used to have a boxed copy of Phobos but gave it to a friend in Japan years ago. :(

Edit: by the way it is kind of fun to see those screenshits of my disk dump working. So close now!! :)


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