Acorn Archimedes Software Preservation

[breach]

Originally Posted by Macaw

Just a bump to ask if the newer rom dumps have been uploaded anywhere? I've been searching for Warlocks and Enter the Realm for years.

Warlocks is one of the Network 23 games I'd like to play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_23_%28company%29

Have you seen Provocator or Deadline anywhere?

[Jon Abbott]

Sounds like you chaps are making good progress.

For those of you using physical Arc's, or simply wishing to keep the ADF's within the emulator, you may be interested in !ADFFS (http://adffs.filecore.net). It's a FileCore file system I'm developing for native ADF support and is read/write with the option to flush changes back to the original ADF or save to another.

Once you've changed the filetype on ADF's, so they're associated with the new FileCore, its simply a matter of launching them to mount and open them.

ADF support is complete and I'm now looking at adding APD support, and providing an emulated floppy drive, for copy protected discs that use ADFS_DiscOp directly to read the discs.

[MarkYoungIW]

Hi Jon,
This looks excellent, and will undoubtably prove popular with .apd support (and later on hopefully IPF!!)

I will look forward to playing with this on real hardware later today.

[breach]

Nice one Jon.

Is there any documentation for the APD file format anywhere?

Also, how do you create an APD from a floppy disc?

[Jon Abbott]

Originally Posted by MarkYoungIW

and later on hopefully IPF!!

IPF support isn't really on the cards, as I've been unable to locate any IPF's.

If someone can private eMail me (details on the ADFFS page) some IPF's, I'll code it in parallel to APD support as I doubt there's a lot of difference if we're dealing with raw MFM.

Originally Posted by breach

Is there any documentation for the APD file format anywhere?

I asked Tom this very question, but I don't think he documented it. He's busy completing his degree so I've tried to figure it out by looking at the files. What I have so far:

APD is GZip compressed, containing the following data structure:
           0 - 7   "APDX0001" identifier
           8 - B   t0sd - Track 0 SD length in bits
           C - F   t0dd - Track 0 DD length in bits
          10 - 13  t0qd - Track 0 QD length in bits
          14 - 1F  t1sd - Track 1 SD length in bits
          20 - 23  t1dd - Track 1 DD length in bits
          24 - 27  t1qd - Track 1 QD length in bits
...                repeated to Track 159
        77C - 787  Track 160 (blank)
...
        7C4 - 7CF  Track 166 (blank)

              7D0  Track 0 SD data
+ (t0sd + 7) >> 3  Track 0 DD data
+ (t0dd + 7) >> 3  Track 0 QD data

+ (t0qd + 7) >> 3  Track 1 SD data
+ (t1sd + 7) >> 3  Track 1 DD data
+ (t1dd + 7) >> 3  Track 1 QD data

SD    data is big-endian raw FM words (not checked this yet)
DD/QD data is big-endian raw MFM words

As of this moment, I'm just coding the sector decoder, so haven't yet figured out if the tracks sides are interleaved or sequential, or if the sectors are in order. I know they are synced with A1 (&4489 in MFM).

I can only guess there are software protected discs with mixed density tracks on the same disc, I can't think of any other reason to mix SD/DD and QD in one file.

I'm sure it will all become clear when I start testing discs and can see how they're reading data via ADFS. I only have a few I've found on the net though, so I suspect there will be a lot of modification needed later to get it working perfectly.

Originally Posted by breach

Also, how do you create an APD from a floppy disc?

Good question, to which I don't have the answer - Mark may know going by the thread above.

[IFW]

For IPF development:
http://www.softpres.org/contact

Also, there are development related threads on:
http://forum.kryoflux.com/

[dlfrsilver]

I got a Lemmings 2 for Acorn computers to sell, is it wanted ?

[MarkYoungIW]

Just one quick question, what would be the situation with multidisc games that only use Drive 0?

[breach]

Originally Posted by Jon Abbott

I'm sure it will all become clear when I start testing discs and can see how they're reading data via ADFS. I only have a few I've found on the net though, so I suspect there will be a lot of modification needed later to get it working perfectly.

There's a handful of APDs here: http://grope.thruhere.net/Qube/qubeftp.html


Anyone seen Quark? It's a gem of a vertical shooter. I can only find the demo here: http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads


So much seems to have been lost to time.

[Jon Abbott]

Originally Posted by MarkYoungIW

Just one quick question, what would be the situation with multidisc games that only use Drive 0?

Anything hard coded to ADFS:0 will fail, if it just wants <FS>:0 you should be fine.

Multidisc games may be an issue, if you no longer have access to the WIMP to change the disc.

What's the game? Can it be installed to the HD?

[antom]

Hi folks, been a while but been incredibly busy since my last post & round of imaging discs. I'll see about getting some of the games posted up to The Zone when I get chance - possibly at the weekend! Hope to get on the Arc again soon to try out some more imaging...

[Jon Abbott]

Does anyone have the ability to create APD's? To ensure the density detection works on APD's, I really need an example of SD and QD discs (1.6MB). They don't need to be protected, but an APD and matching ADF would be helpful so I can compare them side by side.

I've found a grand total of 35 ADP's and have successfully decoded and mounted 32 of them. Trouble is, all the APD's are DD discs, so my assumptions about the sync marks may or may not be applicable to SD / QD discs.

Did any software even come out on SD? All the ADF/APD's I've seen so far are DD or QD. Zarch looks like it could be an odd exception as side 0 is DD and side 1 is possibly SD - not sure if that's down to the protection or not though.

Anyhow, now I've reverse engineered the APD structure, I'm looking into taking over ADFS to present mounted images as ADFS:0

[breach]

Originally Posted by antom

I'll see about getting some of the games posted up to The Zone when I get chance - possibly at the weekend! Hope to get on the Arc again soon to try out some more imaging...

Fantastic!

Originally Posted by Jon Abbott

Does anyone have the ability to create APD's? To ensure the density detection works on APD's, I really need an example of SD and QD discs (1.6MB). They don't need to be protected, but an APD and matching ADF would be helpful so I can compare them side by side.

I've not been able to find any info on APD creation.

Originally Posted by Jon Abbott

Anyhow, now I've reverse engineered the APD structure, I'm looking into taking over ADFS to present mounted images as ADFS:0

Cool.

[breach]

Originally Posted by breach

I've not been able to find any info on APD creation.

Well, I've just found some info, but it's not a lot of use:

*Tom Walker - the writer/maintainer of the wonderful Arculator has put in a great deal of hard work into implementing the .apd disc image format. This allows imaging of most (all?) protected discs which can be read directly by the latest version of his emulator.
To make images, you need:
-An Amiga with an HD_Floppy Drive to image the discs. eg A1200
-Some way of transferring the data to a PC
-Software to do the imaging & processing to .apd format
-Arculator to use said images.
-> See member's area for more details.

That's from http://grope.thruhere.net/Qubebb/vie....php?f=14&t=15

Doesn't seem like it'll be much help to me; I lack an Amiga.

[deicidal]

I have a load of Archimedes cover disks if your interested

[breach]

Originally Posted by deicidal

I have a load of Archimedes cover disks if your interested

Which magazine? There was:

Acorn User
Archimedes World
Acorn Computing

And roughly what date range?

[deicidal]

Originally Posted by breach

Which magazine? There was:

Acorn User
Archimedes World
Acorn Computing

And roughly what date range?

I will try and have a look later if i get chance, not massivly clued up on archimedes. RISC magazine comes to mind but like i said i will check later it was part of a job lot of stuff that i got last year.

right just checked roughly 1992-1995
RISC User - 22 disks
Acorn User - 11 disks
Archimedes World - 16 disks
Acorn Computing - 3 disks

[breach]

Cool. Are there any good game demos on them?

The RISC User ones are most interesting, because the others were all included on later cover CDs, containing compilations of old cover floppy discs, if I remember correctly.

Originally Posted by antom

Hi folks, been a while but been incredibly busy since my last post & round of imaging discs. I'll see about getting some of the games posted up to The Zone when I get chance - possibly at the weekend! Hope to get on the Arc again soon to try out some more imaging...

Did you get a chance to do any more imaging? What have you got so far?

[deicidal]

Right well I am pretty clueless when it comes to the archimedes any suggestions how i go about imaging the disks, or getting hold of a video cable for the a3000/a3020 .

As for the disks themselves no clue from the disks as to the contents.

[breach]

Originally Posted by deicidal

Right well I am pretty clueless when it comes to the archimedes any suggestions how i go about imaging the disks, or getting hold of a video cable for the a3000/a3020 .

I suspect cover discs are unlikely to have copy protection, so you should be able to image to ADF format, which is the simplest and most widely supported.

If you're imaging them on the Acorn, then DImager should do all you want.

DImager: http://radiac.net/projects/riscos/

I'm not sure about imaging them on other platforms, but look at http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=DiscImaging for a bunch of options.

Originally Posted by deicidal

As for the disks themselves no clue from the disks as to the contents.

Oh! I'd have expected them to have had labels with some kind of info at least.