| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Fri, Nov 03rd, 2006 @ 23:58 ( . ) |
Well, I've analyzed it tonight and Bounty Bob definitely uses true halftrack protection. I rewrote n2g and got halftrack support working properly and it now loads further than it did before. It reads about 4 segments, then moves to track 1.5 and then freezes. The disk appears to be mastered such that 1/2 of the track is written out, then the head is stepped out one halftrack and the other 1/2 is written, etc. This is similar to the "Spiradisk" protection on the Apple ][, just not quite as extreme (the Apple could do quarter-tracks). So we're getting somewhere for use in emulators, anyway. It can't be copied without a completely custom routine. |
 | Author: | Vincent Joguin (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Thu, Nov 09th, 2006 @ 06:32 ( . ) |
Hi Pete, It would be interesting if you could create an FDI from this disk, and test it within Hoxs64 to see if it works. If it worked, it may help you create the "remastered" G64 version. Vincent Joguin. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Thu, Nov 09th, 2006 @ 16:26 ( . ) |
Hello Vincent, I was never able to get a machine running Disk2FDI properly. I need to know the exact specs of what it needs again. I think last time the oldest machine I had was a P4-1.8GHz and you mentioned at the time it may not be suitable. I could never even get a D64 image to work. |
| Author: | Vincent Joguin (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Sun, Nov 12th, 2006 @ 10:11 ( . ) |
Hello Pete, > I was never able to get a machine running > Disk2FDI properly. I need to know the exact > specs of what it needs again. I think last > time the oldest machine I had was a P4-1.8GHz > and you mentioned at the time it may not be > suitable. I could never even get a D64 image > to work. In fact, you would need a PCI parallel port card (especially for C64 disks). If I'm not mistaken, you live in the USA, where, for some reason, those cards are not easily found. I would still recommend to buy a good PCI card from Lindy. It's a little bit expensive compared to what we can find in Europe, but at least it should be easy to order on-line. Here is the link to the right product: [link] Along with this, you would of course need a Disk2FDI cable. I don't remember if you made one or anything. Here is the page about this cable: [link] Please let me know if you need further help. Vincent. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Nov 12th, 2006 @ 20:30 ( . ) |
Yes, that was the reason. PCI parallel cards are fairly uncommon here. |
| Author: | Vincent Joguin (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Mon, Nov 13th, 2006 @ 16:48 ( . ) |
Just let me know if you want to get one from Europe and need help. Vincent. |
 | Author: | Womo (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Sun, Dec 31st, 2006 @ 04:40 ( . ) |
Hello Pete, I just discovered this much too old thread. It's about the very first PCI parallel port card that I bought in my life. To tell the truth I got one before, but it was fairly incompatible so that my IOMega parallel port ZIP drive did not run with it. Therefore I asked a friedn who got a credit card, if he could order one for from the USA company SIIG. I got a CyberParallel PCI (JJ-P00112-S6) and was very satisfied over years. They delivered cool DOS drivers (initial setup on bootup via AUTOEXEC.BAT) and the thing worked fine for my ZIP drive as well as The Star Commander. I could use it under Windwos NT 4.0 also (ZIP drive). Currently my SIIG card is located at Spiro to support him in developing support for external LPT port cards into OpenCBM (this does not work yet, PCI IRQs are making some trouble in the DDK hierarchy). I just saw, that SIIG started producing PCIe LPT port cards! I always thought that we finally have to give up on LPT ports with newer computers. It seems not! Yeahah! Have a look at: [link] Womo |
 | Author: | andy (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Fri, Dec 29th, 2006 @ 15:44 ( . ) |
Well, question is WHAT Disk2FDI? The free one available for download is a very old alpha version (1.0a1), which reads to not support FDI creation. So you will need a registered version to accomplish this task... |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Fri, Dec 29th, 2006 @ 19:20 ( . ) |
Vincent was kind enough to send me a registered version to test, but the PCI parallel card needed is rather scarce in the U.S. The idea of people having this combination is even more rare than a real 1541 + parallel cable. I like that it makes a better sample of the disk, but it may be overkill. |
 | Author: | Daryl (registered user: 12 posts ) |
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| Date: | Wed, Apr 11th, 2007 @ 21:17 ( . ) |
I don't know if you need a special kind of pci parallel port card for this to work. I just did a search at newegg.com which turned up many pci parallel port cards ranging from just a few dollars up. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Wed, Apr 11th, 2007 @ 21:19 ( . ) |
On 04/11/2007 @ 21:17, Daryl wrote :
I don't know if you need a special kind of pci parallel port card for this to work. I just did a search at newegg.com which turned up many pci parallel port cards ranging from just a few dollars up. -- I tried a couple of them, but never got it to work. You'd also have to write your own software to process the files. |
 | Author: | Lord Crass (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Sat, Mar 03rd, 2012 @ 18:03 ( . ) |
I took a look at a g64 of Bounty Bob today, but can't get it to read track 1.5 in Vice. It's looking for 5x$77 GCR bytes after a sync mark as the start of sector, but it never finds them, even though they show up in the image file. It keeps finding $52 or $75 after the sync mark, even if I remove those from track with a hex editor. Does anyone know if Vice handles half-tracks properly? It loads further in HOXS, up to 3 blocks remaining, then dies with a checksum error. They really pulled out all the stops for this protection: If the disk isn't write protected, or you have a second drive attached, you'll get a checksum error right away. The sectors are non-standard GCR, extra long, and without standard header. GCR decoding is done on the c64 instead of in the drive. Density is non-standard, and changes when you move to the half-track. I wonder if it was the game's author, Bill Hogue, who wrote this protection? |
 | Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sat, Mar 03rd, 2012 @ 23:35 ( . ) |
Apparently, it works on a 1541-ultimate so I've been told. There must have been too many issues with drives or computers having troubles with the protection, because they toned it down by releasing a version with simple error checking. I have a feeling the checksum error on the 3 blocks left to load is because hoxs is running in pal mode and not ntsc, but I could be wrong about that. Peter, do you still have the original disk and if so, can you test it out on a pal machine? I wonder what kryoflux and markus's flux to g64 tool would do with it? |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Mar 04th, 2012 @ 11:07 ( . ) |
It doesn't load on 1541U2... Either the original dump or "rigged" version you sent. Also, the original NTSC release works on a PAL C64. At least the V1.2 original, which is what I own and still has the same halftrack protection. The protection doesn't appear to read in one continuous motion while stepping like Apple II spiradisk loaders do, it just steps, looks for the marker, reads, steps again. So the timing is probably not super critical. |
| Author: | Lord Crass (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Sun, Mar 04th, 2012 @ 21:55 ( . ) |
The g64 I have loads properly on 1541U-1 with the 2.4a firmware, so the image is good. Must be a vice limitation. I'll file a bug report. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Mar 04th, 2012 @ 23:55 ( . ) |
That's very strange unless I have a different version of it. 1541u2 here with 2.4ac, fails right away at 75 like VICE. |
| Author: | Lord Crass (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Mon, Mar 05th, 2012 @ 10:49 ( . ) |
You made sure to mount the image read-only, and you only have the single drive enabled/attached? Does it fail with a checksum error, or just hang? |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Fri, Mar 09th, 2012 @ 21:28 ( . ) |
It works only mounted as read-only. Which makes me think back- I wonder if this is why the UU custom copier didn't work... I probably never tried write protecting the copy. |
 | Author: | jerrykurtz (registered user: 4 posts ) |
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| Date: | Thu, Mar 22nd, 2012 @ 14:56 ( . ) |
I'm sure I didn't try to write protect my UU copy attempts either. Interesting to hear that the G64 works with 1541U. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Mon, Apr 09th, 2012 @ 20:38 ( . ) |
The SuperCard copier does in fact work if you write protect the copy. D'oh! It copied my 1.2 fine with an SC+. No index-hole required- it used timers/custom copier. So Jim Drew did have it right back in 1989. :) |
| Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Apr 10th, 2012 @ 20:54 ( . ) |
If Jim Drew could do it with his software in 1989, then it can be done by nibtools in 2012. The old saying "where there's a will there's a way comes to mind |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Apr 10th, 2012 @ 21:29 ( . ) |
It's a custom copier, meaning it was created just to write out this one title... which is all it does. It copies a couple of tracks of regular CBM data, then reads in all the halftracks and writes them back out while sweeping the tracks. It would basically take a custom write routine, and there is no "will" on my part. I already have a Super-Card+. :) |
 | Author: | Jim Drew (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Tue, May 15th, 2012 @ 01:01 ( . ) |
Keep in mind that the custom copier just calls routines from the core code. Bounty Bob just requires half tracked writes that are interleaved so that wide head destroys areas not used. There was no real magic to this. Had they used more than 50% of the track (in each half track), it would have not been possible to use a CBM drive to write the data back. |
| Author: | Jim Drew (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Tue, May 15th, 2012 @ 01:04 ( . ) |
Oh, and yes you need to write protect ALL copies where the original never had a write protect notch to begin with. I would say that maybe 80% of the commercials games I saw tried to write to the disk as part of their protection check! |
 | Author: | bluebirdpod (registered user: 28 posts ) |
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| Date: | Wed, May 16th, 2012 @ 09:21 ( . ) |
This is true, you need to WP copies or simply make a WP switch mod to your drive. Legacy of the Ancients will write back to the copy if not WP, and it will only load ONE TIME. I thought the copies were going bad, but after WP them all was good. Remember has released this title on one disk side!, wow modern compression techniques are much better than the old ones. |
| Author: | jerrykurtz (registered user: 4 posts ) |
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| Date: | Wed, May 16th, 2012 @ 12:29 ( . ) |
Shamus formats the disk. I know this from experience as I had a write-protect disable switch on my drive and when I loaded the game, it got formatted. Bye bye original disk. I should have known better... |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Apr 10th, 2012 @ 22:28 ( . ) |
Well, I spoke to soon, again... The copy does boot all the way up and plays through the intro/high score screen, but it if you try to start a game it locks up. Mine is V1.2, so maybe it will copy Jerry's earlier original. Who knows... |
| Author: | jerrykurtz (registered user: 4 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Mar 27th, 2012 @ 11:05 ( . ) |
Now, I'm wondering if a disk from NIBWRITE would load if it were write-protected? |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Mar 27th, 2012 @ 11:24 ( . ) |
I can promise you that it won't work! Nibwrite has no current way to step the head while writing to do those split halftracks. I would have to rewrite all the send routines to incorporate command bytes to do that sort of thing, and even then the timing would be a nightmare to get perfect. It's possible, and you could do density changes also, but it would likely lose framing unless these operations were done while outputting sync... |
| Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Wed, Mar 28th, 2012 @ 09:44 ( . ) |
If this isn't possible through nibtools, you might be able to remaster it through kryoflux with your flux stream. Does kryoflux let you write back to disk yet? |
| Author: | Lord Crass (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Wed, Mar 28th, 2012 @ 21:03 ( . ) |
The timing's pretty loose, actually. The loader simply steps the half-track and waits forever for a sync mark followed by a series of 5 repeating GCR bytes ($75 for normal tracks, $77 for half-tracks), reads $280 GCR bytes and sending them to the host. It does this 4 times, re-finding the sector header (which only appears once on the track) and skipping X bytes each time to pick up the next part of the sector, for a total sector size of about $A10 bytes including sync mark and the $75/$77 header. GCR decode is all done on the host. Tracks in this range (1-17) can hold 7692 bytes under normal circumstances. Writing a 2576 byte sector so that it doesn't overlap the neighbouring tracks shouldn't require any special timing other than stepping the head after the end of the previous track's sector and then writing out the next track's sector. Obviously, this does require 8k RAM or a parallel cable due to the sector length. Of course, it's still quite a bit of work to program and test a completely custom write routine for a single game. I don't think it'd be worth it. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Mar 04th, 2012 @ 11:37 ( . ) |
Hi Stephen, I was never able to get that "cleaned up" version of BBSB to work, even in HOXS or 1541u2 like you said it did. Did you send me the wrong version? |
| Author: | hyper active (registered user: 296 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Mar 04th, 2012 @ 22:36 ( . ) |
Ah. thanks for clearing up that confusion, I don't have a 1541-u-x, so I can't test it out for myself. |
 | Author: | J Achernar (registered user: 36 posts ) |
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| Date: | Tue, Mar 20th, 2012 @ 19:31 ( . ) |
No, testing that I have done indicates that WinVICE definitely does NOT handle halftracks correctly. I believe that this is the cause of the weird behavior with EA fat tracks and some other issues. |
 | Author: | IFWSPS (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Thu, Mar 29th, 2012 @ 12:01 ( . ) |
Vice does not handle half-tracks at all... just take a look at fsimage_read_gcr_image, no half-track is ever loaded. |