Request for how to grab Amiga disk content

Hi, not sure if this is the right area of the forum to create this new thread but here goes...

I am currently attempting to remake Zeewolf, part of my efforts has been to try and think of a decent workflow for creating some of the content such as levels etc. I did start by making level 1 as a tile map but that ended up being an ordeal as it was 256x256 tiles to colour and involved me running Zeewolf in WinUAE and doing this manually by hand.

I come here today to ask if anyone here at EAB would be willing to pass on some of the tricks to be able to get all the content from the Zeewolf ADF such as model data, level data, images, sounds, music, fonts, text, source code (if possible - I wish). I know this is a huge request and even more so given the effort it takes but if it helps to give anyone incentive, I will be happy to write up a guide which could serve to help any others around here in future wanting to grab everything off game ADFs.

A few bits of info...
Zeewolf is an NDOS filesystem and is packed/crunched and uses Rob Northen Compression.

I have used various methods (including Track2File) to attempt to grab the content off the ADF and so far have ended up with 2 files,
Zeewolf.adf.001 (17K)
and
Zeewolf.adf.002 (9K)

Zeewolf.adf.002 (9K) is possible to unpack using RNC ProPacker and results in a 90K file.

I then attempted to open these files (17k and 90k) in HxD and also attempted to turn these 2 files into 68k asm using ira from aminet. I must confess that my knowledge is very low and my gamedev journey is very much in its early stages, however I have taken it upon myself to use Zeewolf remake as the focus project of my learning. I had hoped to be able to gain access to ADF files to be able to try to make the remake as accurate as possible.

Thankyou for reading all this and many thanks to some of the great posts and replies on EAB that I have found really useful over the past week as I have struggled to bumble along with my efforts

[chip]

Welcome to the forum Pdrome

Just a question: when you talk about the "various method to grab the content off the ADF" what exactly you are referring to ?

I mean, what kind of tools do you use and what kind of "manual techniques" do you use ?

Thanks in advance, chip

Originally Posted by chip

Welcome to the forum Pdrome

Just a question: when you talk about the "various method to grab the content off the ADF" what exactly you are referring to ?

I mean, what kind of tools do you use and what kind of "manual techniques" do you use ?

Thanks in advance, chip

Hi chip,

Many thanks for replying and the welcome.
By "various method to grab the content off the ADF" I just mean that I was learning as I went along so started off by trying various methods to get data off ADF files eg
For ADF that is just AmigaDOS there is a website with an applet that can simply extract files from AmigaDOS ADFs very quickly.
But then I found that it couldn't read the Zeewolf ADF so that forced me to dig deeper which lead me to Track2File
Which also then lead me to different Packers and compression used and then in turn it lead me to reading up on RNC ProPacker and an interview by Codetapper with Rob Northen which was very useful for getting an understanding into the methods Rob used to not only lock up and protect games from piracy, but also helped regarding info on the crunching/packing/compression of Robs that some games used.
I also played around with unADF also tried the various compression standards to see if unpacking worked for the Zeewolf.adf which they didn't.

The only method so far which has seemed to yield promising results was the Track2File software which gave me those 2 files I mentioned in my first post.
If that doesn't answer your questions clear enough just let me know and I will pretty much list step by step everything that I have done.
The one last thing I can say is that I did put the 2 files through ira software on aminet which turned the 2 files into 68kasm assembly language - I just don't know if I have done things correctly to result in usable data. I believe the 2 files (the 17K and the 9>90K) are binary files and putting them through HxD did result in game type text in the headers but I wasn't sure if that is what I needed or if I did actually need to turn the binarys into 68kasm.

I really am bumbling along to be honest so any thoughts/guidance is appreciated.

Thanks

[chip]

Hi again Pdrome, thanks for reply

Well, you must know that grabbing stuff from ADFs is something i need too

I know two tools that you didn't mention so, here we go

To extract files from DOS disks you can use ADF Workshop

It's a Windows application, here the download

https://www.tosecdev.org/downloads/c...5-adf-workshop

Instead very useful with the NDOS disks there is WRip

It's an Amiga application, here the download

http://aminet.net/util/misc/WRip_210.lha

Hope this infos can be useful to you .... good ripping

Originally Posted by chip

Hi again Pdrome, thanks for reply

Well, you must know that grabbing stuff from ADFs is something i need too

I know two tools that you didn't mention so, here we go

To extract files from DOS disks you can use ADF Workshop

It's a Windows application, here the download

https://www.tosecdev.org/downloads/c...5-adf-workshop

Instead very useful with the NDOS disks there is WRip

It's an Amiga application, here the download

http://aminet.net/util/misc/WRip_210.lha

Hope this infos can be useful to you .... good ripping

Thanks for the more info, I will have a look at WRip

What happened with your efforts in the end, did you achieve what you wanted to do?

[chip]

I take data from NDOS disks to search for music modules

I love Amiga music, so i explored a little all the possible ways to rip the tunes

I don't have the skill to rip those manually, so i trust of the various tools

But not always i get what i want

I guess main reason is that sometimes data are crunched with "unknown" crunchers

So, the tools like WRip fail to do their job because they don't recognize the "hidden" data

At least this is my conclusion, hope it's correct

[chip]

Another thread on the same issue for you to read

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=90432

Originally Posted by chip

I take data from NDOS disks to search for music modules

I love Amiga music, so i explored a little all the possible ways to rip the tunes

I don't have the skill to rip those manually, so i trust of the various tools

But not always i get what i want

I guess main reason is that sometimes data are crunched with "unknown" crunchers

So, the tools like WRip fail to do their job because they don't recognize the "hidden" data

At least this is my conclusion, hope it's correct

Not sure if you are aware but on aminet you can get RNC ProPacker tools and using that it is possible to unpack a lot of games.

Here's ProPacker
http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/RNC_ProPack

and here is the Rob Northen interview which does list which games used his software.
http://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/rob-northen/

Regarding sometimes not getting usable files... that could be because some files are actually compressed files within compressed files.

Originally Posted by chip

Another thread on the same issue for you to read

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=90432

And finally... yes, I did find that NDOS thread of yours earlier and found it useful thanks!

[malko]

Originally Posted by Pdrome

[...] and here is the Rob Northen interview which does list which games used his software.
http://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/rob-northen/ [...]

Thanks for the link