Anyone got an A4000 with working PAR card?

[mark_k]

The ST15150N drive image ("Digital Domain A4000 Other PAR Drive") seems to contain data for the DPS Perception system. I didn't bother googling that much, but it seems to be one of the later PC products. One search result said a converter program was available from DPS's web site. Presumably that would require a working Perception system to use.

Anyway... The size of the image file is exactly 4GB (2^32) bytes. The actual ST15150N drive capacity is unlikely to be exactly that size. Hopefully it's a bit smaller so no data would have been lost. But it would be good to know the actual drive capacity to be sure. Also, that info could be needed, for example the PAR seems to store file/dir names at an offset from the end of the drive. Maybe the Perception is similar?

Talking of file/dir names, if you load the Perception disk image into a hex editor, go to offset 0xFFFD7400 and see what appear to be directory names. File names appear at offset 0xFFFB7400.

(DPS chose to put metadata near the end of the drive, since that is the slowest part; it leaves all the faster/earlier part of the drive for video/animation data.)

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by mark_k

The ST15150N drive image ("Digital Domain A4000 Other PAR Drive") seems to contain data for the DPS Perception system. I didn't bother googling that much, but it seems to be one of the later PC products. One search result said a converter program was available from DPS's web site. Presumably that would require a working Perception system to use.

Anyway... The size of the image file is exactly 4GB (2^32) bytes. The actual ST15150N drive capacity is unlikely to be exactly that size. Hopefully it's a bit smaller so no data would have been lost. But it would be good to know the actual drive capacity to be sure. Also, that info could be needed, for example the PAR seems to store file/dir names at an offset from the end of the drive. Maybe the Perception is similar?

Talking of file/dir names, if you load the Perception disk image into a hex editor, go to offset 0xFFFD7400 and see what appear to be directory names. File names appear at offset 0xFFFB7400.

(DPS chose to put metadata near the end of the drive, since that is the slowest part; it leaves all the faster/earlier part of the drive for video/animation data.)

The Seagate ST15150N is a 4.3GB drive, which actually is the size the image tries to write out as (I know, because I took a 4gb CF card and it said I was missing like 98mb).

Anyway we could get the Titanic drive to be imaged via dd? When I restore it to the hard drive, it looks like there are things there, but PAR sees nothing. Same with the 4GB, but now we know why that one has plain text on it!

They both seem to be in non-file system format with just raw data though. I'm just not sure if WinUAE added something odd to it or not when imaging. dd rules for such things.

The Adventure continues!

[Starglider 2]

Interesting. So DPS is a video capture card for PC. Hmm.

And yes, I'm working on a dd image of the Titanic drive but it may not be till after the holidays.

Thank you!

Sent from my SM-F900U using Tapatalk

[johnnybarker]

Refitted my PAR card to the a4000 and yes, once the software is run the drive is mounted in WB- tested it with an old 8gb ide drive. The data can then be copied off but I am not sure how readable it would be on a PC. Just putting the images onto compact flash now and hopefully they should be accessible.

J

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

The Seagate ST15150N is a 4.3GB drive, which actually is the size the image tries to write out as (I know, because I took a 4gb CF card and it said I was missing like 98mb).

Anyway we could get the Titanic drive to be imaged via dd? When I restore it to the hard drive, it looks like there are things there, but PAR sees nothing. Same with the 4GB, but now we know why that one has plain text on it!

The ST15150N image is not for the Amiga PAR, so if you write that image file to an IDE drive the PAR software won't recognise any files/data on it.

The current .img file created from the ST15150N is exactly 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes. Rounded, that is 4.3GB (HD manufacturers use "decimal gigabytes" when quoting capacities). However it's unlikely the ST15150N has exactly 8,388,608 sectors. So either the last few sectors are missing, or the current image file is padded with some extra data at the end.

[johnnybarker]

Can't get the par card to recognise SD or CF cards. Will need to try putting image onto a real hard drive and see if that works any better. Getting various errors like "ide lockup" and "ide error 4". Do you have the Titanic drive in vhd format?

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by mark_k

The ST15150N image is not for the Amiga PAR, so if you write that image file to an IDE drive the PAR software won't recognise any files/data on it.



The current .img file created from the ST15150N is exactly 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes. Rounded, that is 4.3GB (HD manufacturers use "decimal gigabytes" when quoting capacities). However it's unlikely the ST15150N has exactly 8,388,608 sectors. So either the last few sectors are missing, or the current image file is padded with some extra data at the end.

Correct, it is not a PAR drive: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1366580

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by johnnybarker

Can't get the par card to recognise SD or CF cards. Will need to try putting image onto a real hard drive and see if that works any better. Getting various errors like "ide lockup" and "ide error 4". Do you have the Titanic drive in vhd format?

Sorry I do not and I am currently traveling to spend the holidays with family.

[grelbfarlk]

The PAR is a little picky about what IDE drives it will like. If it doesn't detect the specific PIO mode it wants then it will complain that the drive is not compatible. This prevented me from using a CF adapter with it, I think because the CF adapter or card was not reporting PIO2 support, or PIO3, can't remember which it wanted. Ended up using some 18GB 2.5" IDE drive with it and it liked that.

[johnnybarker]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

Sorry I do not and I am currently traveling to spend the holidays with family.

Probably more important! Have great Christmas.

I have an 8.4gb Ide drive which works and I am pretty sure I have a 4.3gb drive somewhere but can't for the life of me find it. Will have another bash today but I should probably also spend some time with the kids.

I'll let you know if I have any success.

[mark_k]

After looking/thinking about it some more, I think the "Digital Domain A4000 Titanic PAR Drive.hdf" is a bad/incomplete dump.

Source drive was a Quantum Fireball 1080A which has logical CHS geometry 2112/16/63. So (in LBA mode) it will have at least 2,128,896 sectors. The HDF file size matches that. However the last non-zero byte in the HDF is at offset 0x38FFFFFF, which just happens to be on an exact 16MB boundary.

The PAR program code definitely seems to store something near the end of the disk (at max. LBA minus 32 and max.LBA minus 65569). But those regions are all-zero in the HDF.

My guess is, there was some error (probably with the source drive) when the HDF was created. Especially if a cheap USB-IDE adapter was used, maybe it returned all-zero data after an error or timeout occurred.

[Starglider 2]

It's possible. Thanks for trying. I'm going to get a ddrescue dump. But it will be after the holidays as I'm visiting family. Happy holidays!

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by LanceT

Strange File recovered from the Work Partition.
"seldanes.1"

Here's the finished product:

[ Show youtube player ]

[LanceT]

Cool discovery....

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Here's the finished product:

Michael Karp was (un)credited as working on "The Titanic" as "video assist" and worked on a quite few other movies (including Apollo 13) as "motion control operator" and "3D tracker"

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0439935/

[SantiDarkG]

I have my PAR working with Hitachi MicroDrives 4Gb.

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by mark_k

After looking/thinking about it some more, I think the "Digital Domain A4000 Titanic PAR Drive.hdf" is a bad/incomplete dump.

Source drive was a Quantum Fireball 1080A which has logical CHS geometry 2112/16/63. So (in LBA mode) it will have at least 2,128,896 sectors. The HDF file size matches that. However the last non-zero byte in the HDF is at offset 0x38FFFFFF, which just happens to be on an exact 16MB boundary.

The PAR program code definitely seems to store something near the end of the disk (at max. LBA minus 32 and max.LBA minus 65569). But those regions are all-zero in the HDF.

My guess is, there was some error (probably with the source drive) when the HDF was created. Especially if a cheap USB-IDE adapter was used, maybe it returned all-zero data after an error or timeout occurred.

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's WinUAE's fault or not, but I always image my drives with the gnome disk utility, which I'm almost positive just uses dd on the backend. Unfortunately I do it so often, now I can't seem to find some of my other images I've made of hard drives, sd cards, etc for retro systems. So many times I'm just like 'let's do a dump before I screw something up...' but then can I find it??

[AmigaHope]

btw Starglider did the source system include a Sunrize card? My PAR setup included a DPS PAR, DPS TBC IV, and Sunrize AD516 so I could capture and play back synchronized audio in the DPS video suite. In this configuration the audio was handled in Amiga-land while video was handled directly by the DPS's hdd controller.

Regarding the DPS Perception drive image, I think it will be VERY difficult to extract data from it without a real Perception card. Around the time DPS moved to Windows they also started to experiment with custom codecs and moved away from simple MJPEG. (A similar situation to why it's so hard to extract Newtek Flyer video data). DPS released software implementations of some of their later codecs but I think the Perception is an exception and there's no real way to decode it without the hardware.

[johnnybarker]

Hi,

Just to let you know that I never had any success with the par image files but the workbench ones worked fine. I tried using uae disc tools and winimage. Not tried ddrescue so I'll try this next. Did you say the SCSI drive came from the a4000 or did you find it separately? I noticed that the a4000 in your video had a dkb rapid-fire (I think) SCSI controller but as Amigahope says if the drive is for the DPS perception card then it may not work. My assumption had been that the SCSI drive had been used to back up the par the files. After a good bit of tinkering I can confirm that it really easy to export files from the par drive to any of the Amiga drives either through the export button in the par software or by dragging and dropping. The par drive is usually called DDR and appears on the WB screen once the PAR software has been run.

Keep us posted if you manage to get another image file.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by johnnybarker

Hi,



Just to let you know that I never had any success with the par image files but the workbench ones worked fine. I tried using uae disc tools and winimage. Not tried ddrescue so I'll try this next. Did you say the SCSI drive came from the a4000 or did you find it separately? I noticed that the a4000 in your video had a dkb rapid-fire (I think) SCSI controller but as Amigahope says if the drive is for the DPS perception card then it may not work. My assumption had been that the SCSI drive had been used to back up the par the files. After a good bit of tinkering I can confirm that it really easy to export files from the par drive to any of the Amiga drives either through the export button in the par software or by dragging and dropping. The par drive is usually called DDR and appears on the WB screen once the PAR software has been run.



Keep us posted if you manage to get another image file.

You may be right. The SCSI drive was "with" the A4000 but not necessarily from it. Thanks!

[Pyromania]

@AmigaHope

You may already know this but I’ll mention it just in case. I’ve found that many people don’t know about it. You can load and convert NewTek Flyer video data in an old version of NewTek Aura (TV Paint) without a Flyer card. I believe this is around version 2.0 of Aura (Windows version). Also, hopefully the Amiga Video Flyer Developer Manual that I recently added to Open Video Toaster may help support the format more I hope. Sorry to go a little off topic. Maybe developer manuals exist for the PAR card and Perception card? I’m not sure and DPS got bought out many years ago so they might be hard to find.