I have a serious problem

When I had my 1200, I bought two CDs full of commercial games.
The guy who made that was my friend who owned a little computer shop. One of those who copy pirated games to floppies and sell them for cheap prices. That was his entire archive and he was no longer able to find customers to sell Amiga games.:thumbs_do

The CDs had scratches on them and it was obvious that some files were unreadable. We copied all files to HD and burnt them on new CDs. During the process some unreadable files were skipped.

The files were in DMS format and names were all like 1084-2.dms or 602-3.dms etc... and I was given an excel document explaining what is contained within each file. (I could open that file somehow) The guy who organized the file did not know the English language very well and most of the game names were wrong. And since some DMS files were missing, that database had to be reorganized.

That was years ago.

A few days ago I copied the entire archive to my HD and extracted the DMS files to ADFs using Xdms. Some files failed to unpack during this process as well.

I decided to rename them and referred to the tosec database when I was not sure about the exact name of a game. Within two days I renamed 2000+ ADFs.:hooooo

Now I know what is contained in each file but some of them still have read/write and checksum errors. Maybe they had these errors before they were first DMSed.

For Dos disks, I try to copy the entire contents of the disk to Ram Disk: in order to test if there are any errors. And I use an utility named Disk Peek to check if there are any problems with the bootblock BUT I cannot do anything for Non-DOS disks. I cannot check them this way! X-Copy's checkdisk function does not work properly and I am stuck.

Please name an utility that can detect read and checksum errors on adfs.

Also the tosec database only recognizes a little amount of my disks properly. Sometimes only *some* disks of multiple disk games are recognized and some are not.

If my files are recognized by tosec, does this also mean that they are free of errors?

It would be great if I could just check the files from windows using a magical utility.

[Walker]

When TOSEC fails to identify one or more disks of a multiple disk game, it's usually because there's a save game file on it. There are other reasons, but I think this is the most common one.

I have the latest DAT files, and yet TOSEC fails to identify a lot of my ADFs. Sometimes I can find out why by checking the disk for different cracks, trainers etc. Sometimes the DAT file has no info about my game at all.

I'm not 100% sure about how the TOSEC team wants us to deal with unidentified disks. I'm sure the DAT files could be improved a lot if we all helped out by sending them unidentified images. To make that work, I would like to see some sort of guide for this from TOSEC. Maybe there is one available somewhere?

[Twistin'Ghost]

I agree. The most frustrating thing for me with TOSEC'ing my collection is that too often there will be that one disk (usually disk 1) of a multidisk game that will be unrecognized. It could just as easily be that the version used to create the crc in the TOSEC database has a saved game or two, as well. I still contend that all of the [a] files be written to the same filename unless it is known to truly be an alternate (via a different crack, trainer, fix, etc.) It would require loooking at these disks in Directory Opus or something, but this would certainly be better than a bottomless pit of [a25] files that clock in at a meg every time.

Oh, and Burseg - can you post those 2000+ files to the ADF Zone?

:haha LOL :haha twistin'
you can be sure that I will find a way to share them with other amigans as soon as I solve these problems.

I think the idea behind tosec is ok but practically it is painful rather than helpful for amiga users. It can be a suitable system for consoles but not amiga disks since disks are subject to modification by anyone and console and arcade cartridges are not. Many of my disks have intros of -local- crack teams in them that may be the reason of the recognization problem as well.

that means many of my ADFs will never be compatible with tosec so I am not renaming them for tosec standards but use the following format

"Game Name - 1 of 3.adf"

I have my reasons:

-Long file names look UGLY :kill

-As the file name gets longer, it gets less funnier. You find yourself organizing the disk names rather than playing with them.

-There are still many missing titles in tosec and some of the ones available have errors in their names.

There should have been a way to hide information like the company name the name of the team etc. in a different location than the actual file name. maybe witihn the properties window of the page. It would be much professional. Maybe such an application can be written.

@s4murai

thanks for mentioning disksalv I'l try it now. + I have the latest dats.

I used to think like you too Burseg, but about a week ago I decided to give it a try (partly due to my laziness), and I'm very impressed and happy with the results

But you're right. If you don't like the TOSEC way, there's no need to switch to it

[Walker]

If you want to have all your 2500+ games renamed properly, forget about the whole thing.
But, if you want to get rid of some duplicates, bad ADFs and maybe even find some games you didn´t know you had in your possession, give it a try.

I still would like to get some guidelines from the TOSEC team about the DAT updates though.