How to transfer games from oddball format floppies to the hard disk?

[Hyperfrog]

Let's say I have a bunch of 5.25" floppy disks with games on them. They're not readable under DOS because they use oddball formats, but they're bootable. When I want to play such a game, I have to use its floppy to boot the PC with. Sooner or later, the floppy disk will fail, and the game will be lost.

I know I can make disk images with Teledisk or Dave Dunfield's IMD program. (BTW, the latter is a really good program for creating disk images.) However, I still need to write the disk image to a floppy disk when I want to play the game, and eventually, floppy disks will be as rare as the dodo bird. What I would like to do is copy the game to the hard disk, and load it from there. If I could mount floppy disk images under DOS, it would be a step in the right direction, but then, since the problematic floppy disks are not readable under DOS, I would need to be able to reboot the machine on the mounted disk image, which I do not think is possible because the BIOS would not know anything about the mounted disk image. So unless someone has written a BIOS extension that can mount floppy disk images, I don't think this approach is going to solve the problem.

What can I do? Is there a generic solution to this problem? Or even case-by-case solutions?

Thanks,

Christian

 

[Marrr]

Probably the easiest solution is to search for ripped versions. Safe bet all PC booter games have been ripped to files long long time ago...

 

[hargle]

Oooh! This one's right up my alley.

As one of my many hobbies, I convert old booters to working under plain ole DOS.

See:
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/BCW
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/jumpman
I've done others, but these were not only converted to DOS, but fully disassembled and then updated to support modern hardware (fully playable on old machines of course)

and finally, if you're playing with a 386 or better machine, try this floppy disk emulator:
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper

I am also quite interested in knowing what games you may have that are booters; I collect them all.

Not all of the games out there have been ripped to DOS usage. None of the flight simulator games for example have been, yet. (on my todo list)

 

[Hyperfrog]

Folks, thank you for your suggestions so far.

Marrr, finding ripped versions of those games is not as easy as it seems, because they are so old they only interest a few geeks like us nowadays. Besides, I have the floppies readily available, so if there's a way to "rescue" the games they contain...

Hargle, thanks for the info. Flopper is awesome! However, my vintage PCs are a PCjr and a Tandy 1000HX, so it won't run on these if a 386 is required. Does it run under DOSBox? That would allow me to play those games that take advantage of the PCjr/Tandy 1000 graphics capabilities.

Beyond Castle Wolfenstein if one the games I was trying to "rescue" from a floppy disk.

As for the list of booter games, I still havent compiled one, but I will. Here are a few that I have been trying to "rescue" in the last couple of days:

Demon's Forge (1983)
Defender (1983)
Flight Simulator II (1984)
Cosmic Crusader (1982)
Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
King's Quest (PCjr) (1983)
Big Top (1983)
Lode Runner (1983)

I have a big pile of disks that I've not yet tried out, so I'm sure I will discover many more booter games. I will gladly send you any disk image if you are going to look into how to "rescue" them.

Are you or do you know the operator of oldskool.org? I've been trying to download files from Tvdog's archive mirror lately, but the oldskool.org FTP server is not accessible.

Cheers,

Christian

 

[Fallo]

Not all of the games out there have been ripped to DOS usage. None of the flight simulator games for example have been, yet. (on my todo list)

Certain games like King's Quest may be impossible to rip due to the way the data is stored, and since you could just play the DOS version of KQ, it's pretty much unnecessary.

Marrr, finding ripped versions of those games is not as easy as it seems, because they are so old they only interest a few geeks like us nowadays. Besides, I have the floppies readily available, so if there's a way to "rescue" the games they contain...

Some booter games like Alley Cat and Dig Dug can be found all over the net, but others are rarer. You want to go to Retrograde Station if you're looking for them, although the site appears to be down today.

Hargle, thanks for the info. Flopper is awesome! However, my vintage PCs are a PCjr and a Tandy 1000HX, so it won't run on these if a 386 is required. Does it run under DOSBox? That would allow me to play those games that take advantage of the PCjr/Tandy 1000 graphics capabilities.

You can just boot the images in DOSBox and run them. Flopper is not required. If you wanted to run King's Quest for example, you would type BOOT KQ1.IMG -L A, where A is the drive letter.

Demon's Forge (1983)
Defender (1983)
Flight Simulator II (1984)
Cosmic Crusader (1982)
Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
King's Quest (PCjr) (1983)
Big Top (1983)
Lode Runner (1983)

Defender, Cosmic Crusader, Big Top, and Lode Runner all have DOS rips; the others don't. I never heard of Buckaroo Banzai. Retrograde Station doesn't even have it.

I myself have only one original booter game; Troll's Tale.

 

[Hyperfrog]

since you could just play the DOS version of KQ, it's pretty much unnecessary.

But the PCjr version is in 16 colours... And my ultimate goal is to be able to play it on the PCjr from the hard disk (well, a ZIP disk actually).

You can just boot the images in DOSBox and run them. Flopper is not required. If you wanted to run King's Quest for example, you would type BOOT KQ1.IMG -L A, where A is the drive letter.

Good thing to know! What program should I use to create the disk image? Not all disk imagers can cope with oddball formats.

Thanks,

Christian

 

[hargle]

Good thing to know! What program should I use to create the disk image? Not all disk imagers can cope with oddball formats.

That's the problem. If there is any copy protection in the diskette itself, like for example a bad sector, the image program will typically fail. To make matters worse, floppy emulators, like dosbox can't reproduce the exact errors that the floppy drive is doing, and thus the game will most likely fail to load.

Same with the flight simulator disks. They are all 5 sectors per track, 1k sector size. DOSBox pukes on it. (I'm actually converting a bunch of scenery disks to standard sector formatting for use in dosbox while I type this!)

So, the only hope is that you can find some version that has been cracked to remove the copy protection, or the emulator might be able to handle it.
Flopper can handle really, really simple copy protection, but that's about it.

It just so happens that a) most of the games you've got are already available for DOS, and b) we're here to help! (check your PMs)

PCjr KQ1 is absolutely a problem though. Again, on my todo list, but that one is going to be tough to do, as fallo says, particularly because it's so hard to debug on the PCjr.

Oh and yes, I'm friends with the oldskool owner. he's here too, user name is trixter, and he's probably aware that FTP is down. If it doesn't come back soon, remind me and I'll poke him.

 

[Fallo]

But the PCjr version is in 16 colours... And my ultimate goal is to be able to play it on the PCjr from the hard disk (well, a ZIP disk actually).

The DOS version of KQ has PCjr/Tandy support, but it requires 384k to run on them (256k for standard PCs). If your PCjr has 128k and no memory expanders, you can only run the booter version. I'd rather run the DOS version myself because it doesn't require you to make a special save disk.

Good thing to know! What program should I use to create the disk image? Not all disk imagers can cope with oddball formats.

You could get the image from Retrograde Station once it's back up, or someone here can e-mail it to you.

 

[Great Hierophant]

Also, the screen drawing and loading may run faster with the PC Booters than the DOS versions of Sierra games, especially with a 7.16 or 4.77MHz processor.

Demon's Forge (1983)
Defender (1983)
Flight Simulator II (1984)
Cosmic Crusader (1982)
Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
King's Quest (PCjr) (1983)
Big Top (1983)
Lode Runner (1983)

All but Buckaroo Banzai you should be able to find at Retrograde Station.
http://retrograde.trustno1.org/index2.htm

 

[bugman2112]

Hargle, I got one for you. Not exactly a boot conversion problem, but still a concern in preservation. Perhaps you have already encountered this and have a resolution. The Original Castle Wolfenstein. All the files can be seen through DOS. And it appears to load just fine. But, it only works correctly under dos 2.1, which makes it impossible to load onto a hard drive or get working from a 1.44M drive (I'm talking about using on an actual XT, I know there are other options if using on a modern setup like DOSbox). The symtoms are it boots and loads fine. But when you start in the castle, you are immediately captured. Then, you get stuck into an endless intro screen/demo loop that can't be broken out of unless you re-boot.

 

[hargle]

Hargle, I got one for you. Not exactly a boot conversion problem, but still a concern in preservation. Perhaps you have already encountered this and have a resolution. The Original Castle Wolfenstein. All the files can be seen through DOS. And it appears to load just fine. But, it only works correctly under dos 2.1, which makes it impossible to load onto a hard drive or get working from a 1.44M drive (I'm talking about using on an actual XT, I know there are other options if using on a modern setup like DOSbox). The symtoms are it boots and loads fine. But when you start in the castle, you are immediately captured. Then, you get stuck into an endless intro screen/demo loop that can't be broken out of unless you re-boot.

I wonder if it's doing something similar to what I found with the amazing spider-man from questprobe? the "only works in dos 2.1" is what is giving me a clue.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/spider-man/trivia

Thinking that the game is unable to load some of the play data into memory, which then causes it to gork like that. I could certainly take a look into it.
(wow, I have a LOT of things to do!)

This would be pretty easy to check into though, so I think I can squeeze it in.
Probably not as easy to fix.

 

[bugman2112]

One possible lead, it works under DOSbox. Not sure which DOS version that tries to emulate, but it is compatable with whatever CW is trying to do.

 

[Hyperfrog]

Also, the screen drawing and loading may run faster with the PC Booters than the DOS versions of Sierra games, especially with a 7.16 or 4.77MHz processor.

This is certainly true with PCs, but not necessarily with the PCjr. The first 128KB of RAM is shared between the CPU and the video subsystem, and it is quite slow. If you load DOS, you can also load a device driver that creates a RAM disk with the unused portion of the first 128KB, so that the user programs load after this, and thus run faster.

 

[hargle]

The screen drawing being super slow on the PCjr was one of hte ways I was able to complete KQ1! All you have to do is watch how the screen is drawn, then the last thing it does is draw all the movable items to the screen. Watching the screen just to the left of the castle where the bolder is, is a perfect example of what to look for.

I suspect on a faster machine, this little cheat would go away!

 

[Fallo]

I wonder if it's doing something similar to what I found with the amazing spider-man from questprobe? the "only works in dos 2.1" is what is giving me a clue.

I think I know what's wrong. The game must be one of those that only works if loaded in the first 64k. I encountered a similar problem with the DOS rip of Agent USA from Retrograde Station. It locked up on my 5150 as soon as I travelled to another town, but my Windows 95 laptop ran the game with no problem at all. I figured that because all the device drivers and most of DOS were in the UMBs and HMA, programs would start loading in the first 64k. On my 5150, I'm using DOS 3.30, which occupies memory up to segment 1000:0. I got around the problem by using a DOS 3.00 boot disk that I discovered in a box of disks that was given to me. Since 3.00 is smaller than 3.30, Agent USA would then load below 1000:0 and run without incident.

The screen drawing being super slow on the PCjr was one of hte ways I was able to complete KQ1! All you have to do is watch how the screen is drawn, then the last thing it does is draw all the movable items to the screen. Watching the screen just to the left of the castle where the bolder is, is a perfect example of what to look for.

No, you can see the screen being drawn even on a normal XT. That was the reason why Sierra switched to double-buffering with the DOS versions of the AGI engine; so that hidden items (like the cheese in the witch's cupboard) would not be seen right away.