Flight Sim scenery disks wanted (PC)

[hargle]

I'm looking for old FS 2.x series scenery disks to complete a collection. These would traditionally be on a 5.25" disk.

Specifically I'm looking for:
SD-5, 6, 8, 10, 12, SD-EUR (Western European Tour) and SD-San Francisco STAR scenery disk.

I have all the other ones, if anyone is interested in trades.

thanks!

 

[linuxlove]

i have a scenery disk, but i'm not sure what version it is. and i can't check because the computer that i have my 5.25" drive in has some sort of weirdness that makes it not read 360k disks. You want it?

 

[mbbrutman]

Private messages!

 

[hargle]

I'll certainly take a look at whatever you've got. How are you going to read it though? (or do you want to send the physical disk to me?)


The odd thing about these disks is that if the disk itself isn't labeled, there is no good way of knowing what disk it is, unless you starting pawing through the code itself and look for key ASCII strings in the data that show what airports are included. If you just do a dir on the disk from DOS, you'll likely only see a readme.txt file that simply says "this is a scenery disk, press ctrl-E (or whatever) to load the files inside the FS" It doesn't say what version or disk it is.

The tricky part about looking through the actual data on the disk is that the disk itself uses nonstandard 1k sized sectors, numbered 65h-69h on 1 side of the disk. So no disk editing software can actually read the data.

I wrote a utility to pull the data off the disk and dump it into a standard sector 1.44mb disk image, which you can then use in DOSBox, and they work if you use one of my modified game disks where i've converted the 1k sector reads to two 512byte reads in the code.

i'm working with this guy:
http://www.volny.cz/havlikjosef/fshistoryenglish.htm

to create disk images of these games that work in DOSBox. So far we've gotten several versions of FS and these scenery disks available for DOSBox. Completing the collection would be a great chunk of history preserved.