Completing an ADF collection VS 2009 TOSEC DATs

[killergorilla]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Thanx. Since these are DOS executables, could it be even remotely possible to play these games with a DOS emulator ?
Also, does that have any incidence on their degree of compatibility when run on beefed-up Amigas ?

Bwahahahahahaha.

[NewDeli]

I was wondering if a few of them would run in DOSbox, eventually in a patched Dosbox. Nvm, probably a dumb idea.

Beefed-up Amigas = A1200 and A4000's.

[killergorilla]

If you get them running in DosBox let me know

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Nvm, probably a dumb idea.

Fixed.

[Graham Humphrey]

Posts above split from this thread - at the request of NewDeli and TCD. Hope I've got this right - if any posts need to be moved back or would be better in the other thread please let me know. Thanks!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Who took the decision to code these .EXE's ?

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Thanx. Since these are DOS executables, could it be even remotely possible to play these games with a DOS emulator ?

Dude, an EXE is just a binary file that can be executed. It's still an AmigaDOS file. Thought you knew a tad more about how your computer works. Guess I was wrong...

[NewDeli]

Last couple of questions on the subject hopefully :
Does anyone know if these .EXE's have issues with 030s & 040s, in a similar fashion to classics from old floppies / ADFs ? i.e. would it be worth patching any of these games to make them load from HD + quit to WB ?

[killergorilla]

Really depends on who made them, whether they fixed them to work with various models.

In general I avoid exes.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Does anyone know if these .EXE's have issues with 030s & 040s, in a similar fashion to classics from old floppies / ADFs ? i.e. would it be worth patching any of these games to make them work from HD ?

Not sure what you mean by 'classics' and 'fashion', but yes, they might suffer from the same incompatibilities as any other Amiga program. This should have been fairly obvious already as mai already explained that it's just a different format.

[killergorilla]

How about you just don't worry about?

Why does everything have to be so difficult...

[waal]

EXE were generally one-parted and compressed games for compilation disks. Like Il Scuro or PHS of Defjam-CSS used to do. I don't remember much what was in use later during the AGA era but I think I used single filed games from my HD... Or was it just demos and intros...

Well...

Whatever...

Who cares anyway...

Weird........................

[[idoru]]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Here's my report :

• Had to rename Telekommando kehrt zurück, Das v1.02 (1993-12-02)(Telekom)(DE)(FW)[promo].zip (and its ADF)
• Had to rename Strip Poker Three Data Disk #4 - Stacey & Desireé (1991)(Artworx)[data disk].zip (and its ADF)

My conclusion : ü's & é's (well, accents) shouldn't be used in DATs at all.
And by the way, the name of the naked lady from that Strip Poker game ought to be Desirée, not Desireé !

Accented characters are not included in dats as a matter of course as they do cause problems - annoying for renaming but true. Those entries must have sneaked through by mistake, I'm sure mai will correct them in his next Amiga Games update.

[mai]

Originally Posted by [idoru]

I'm sure mai will correct them in his next Amiga Games update.

In current WIP fixed.

[[idoru]]

thnx

[NewDeli]

Guys, no baiting ! I was just curious about some scene trivia surrounding their release since mai mentioned it was mostly crackers who dealt with this format. The Amiga had a lot of compression algorithms available, yet they had to choose DOS / binary. it's not exactly commonplace, if you ask me.
May be it was made that way so that deleting each of them would be a one-step process ("play it & bin it" concept) .

OK, I have another question, or rather a suggestion : What about offering a "cleaned up" ADF DAT apart from those existing ? This optional DAT would mark unnecessary all bad dumps plus disks with vrii'd bootblocks and checksum errors, so that 100% of the remaining ADF sets would work the first time they're booted from.

[TCD]

First of all : Indeed Sting

Originally Posted by NewDeli

Guys, no baiting ! I was just curious about some scene trivia surrounding their release since mai mentioned it was mostly crackers who dealt with this format. The Amiga had a lot of compression algorithms available, yet they had to choose DOS / binary. it's not exactly commonplace, if you ask me.
May be it was made that way so that deleting each of them would be a one-step process ("play it & bin it" concept) .

Who said those EXEs weren't packed? Sorry, if you just can't grasp the idea what an EXE is, just leave it alone

[DH]

Originally Posted by NewDeli

OK, I have another question, or rather a suggestion : What about offering a "cleaned up" ADF DAT apart from those existing ? This optional DAT would mark unnecessary all bad dumps plus disks with vrii'd bootblocks and checksum errors, so that 100% of the remaining ADF sets would work the first time they're booted from.

I think what we already have is more impressive than I/we could of imagined and most are marked reasonably correct, with the few exceptions. TNC (TOSEC Naming Convention) is what we use as a guideline (not sure if it's compulsory yet) to name things and most, if not all, have these codes added to them anyway. You just need another method of filtering such data from what you need.

I have created a full database from all these Dats (Commodore Amiga - Games - [ADF] (TOSEC-v2006-10-19_CM)) in access (21,852 entries), for personal use atm, where I can filter such things out if I needed, although I must add, as these DATS are still WIP, as in renaming the incorrect entries, it's a bit pointless for someone to even think about creating another set of DATS out of something that contains imperfections. Who really wants to correct things twice

[NewDeli]

Thanks for that informative post.

Of course, it would be pretty unlikely that such custom DATs would be included with the official ones which as you mention are already elaborated and polished.

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

I have created a full database from all these Dats (Commodore Amiga - Games - [ADF] (TOSEC-v2006-10-19_CM)) in access (21,852 entries), for personal use atm, where I can filter such things out if I needed

For my own needs, I might do something similar. I am not thinking about doing some additional renaming, but simply removing any reference to vrii'd and bad dumps. ClrMame Pro would then move those files to its back up folder, and the resulting set would be n00b friendly, so to speak (that's a bit simplistic, I know).

I am not criticizing the fact that bad dumps and vrii'd disks can still be found in DATs. This said, if I were curious about ADF sets after a long hiatus (which happens with a quite a few Amiga users, AFAIK) I would certainly be surprised to find them mixed up with the "good" releases. Usually, the corresponding disks are blanked or cleaned up by individuals (hence the load of disks with funny bootloaders resulting of some antivirus action, I assume).

Last, may I ask if there are any tool to edit DATs (other than notepad ) ? I stumbled upon DAT Workshop Pro from EmuLab, but didn't try it out yet.

[BippyM]

I think you miss what tosec is all about!

It isn't about finding, hoarding, collecting roms/adf's/iso's etc, it's about identification.

The TNC was developed to support a standard that would allow the naming and identification easily. Whilst I support the need for a bad dumps dat so anything that is knackered is filtered out, and users can then choose to delete the bad shite and keep the good, the tosec team have never really supported this idea.

[NewDeli]

It's understandable for TOSEC guys to be somehow conservative about their work.
Also, glad to know ol'timers such as you or DH share some of my thoughts about this.
For our own needs, using keywords and any common text editor to forge such DAT(s) wouldn't be too time consuming, anyway.
May be such alternate DAT(s) could be allowed at some point in the future, when the official ADF sets hit a milestone revision number.

I think I get the general idea of TOSEC, thank you, and most of my questions got properly answered.