Rare: Battle Squadron 100% (2 disks)

[RetroMan]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
How does it compare to later vertical-scrolling shoot-em-ups like SWIV & Banshee?

Me personally like BS better than those two you mentioned Well, Banshee may got a slightly better gfx but the gameplay definitely rox in BS, also the two player mode is really kewl

[Konrad]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
What you call an "intro" for Battle Squadron ?

That nice pic while loading the game ? Because thats the only bit of intro I ever saw in Battle Squadron.

But I saw a nice intro of Battle Squadron in the mega-drive version

No, not the title screen. There were picture stills telling the story. Similiar to the extro of the game.


Whoops, missed Gary's post .

[Frootloop]

I've been playing BS again for the last few days and it's defintely one of the best shooters ever. For a 1989 game the graphics, playability and sound are simply amazing. It's so addictive, I keep wanting to play just one more game.

[Kodoichi]

Originally posted by RetroMan
Me personally like BS better than those two you mentioned

Yeah, along with Hybris, BS is the best vertical shoot 'em up on the Amiga... followed by Scorpio

[7-Zark-7]

Trying to find it now.....Argh. Tell me, does anyone manage to download anything at Amiga Power-the Good old Days site, anymore?
In the "good old days", I wouldn't have a problem d/l anything there, but just like the last time I visited there a few months ago, I get the "max 10 users allowed, server is full" message. I'm almost surprised it doesn't get its own advertising pop-up!
Damm shame-used to be a good ADF site too.
Found it at last, curse my brain dead memory cells.

[andreas]

Originally posted by Codetapper
Bullshit.

Only complete lamer patchers would ever tamper with the disk image. The whole WHDLoad project relies on extracting the data off the original disk and patching around it.

Define "tamper".
(The following section applies to AmigaDOS disks only, not to alien formats!)
If you resize an AmigaDOS disk image because only 80% of the tracks are used in the game, for me this *is* already tampering. The image will be called something similar to 'Disk.1' and is *less* than 880K! It's just and undoubtedly *not* the original disk image anymore!

Sometimes AmigaDos disks appear smaller than 901120 bytes purely because we analyse the game and work out where there are redundant tracks - for example Stunt Car Racer.

... or Exile....

There is no point having a 901120 byte file when the game never loads more than about 450k - so in the imager I slice out the useless part which means Amiga's without much memory can still play the game.

slicing out = tampering = modifying (in some way)

But it might be useful to *not* "optimize" this and thus give someone with technical understanding a way to write such an image back to disk, for example if the original real disk is fucked someday in the future, he can still revert to this image. If non-used tracks are removed, the image is non-standard and can be used in WHDload ONLY once and for all...
But you might have a point that if someone wants such thing, he should use a warper then.
Anyway, fortunately some disk images (e. g. Last Battle by Elite) were *NOT* touched by either imager nor WHDload, so I could just rename Disk.1 to something.ADF and use it in the emulator without any problems!!
Isn't that wonderful? If you *optimize* an AmigaDOS image, you cannot do this any longer because the emulator doesn't understand under-sized images!
It might not have been purpose to "allow" a use of these images with an emulator, but it's a very nice side-effect!
I hope you get my point.

I would say that the only people who modify disk images are twats that can't crack games properly and use generic slaves to run a cracked disk image. And these unofficial patches will never be uploaded to the WHDLoad site.

Define 'modify'. (see above)
My assertion was that the image data is changed by the *installer*, now I see that it's *DIC* that does these "optimizations" on the fly when it creates an image!

Thanks for the clarification.

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
Just to go slightly off-topic, but still Battle Squadron related, what's everyone's opinion's on it?
How does it compare to later vertical-scrolling shoot-em-ups like SWIV & Banshee? I do recall Zzap giving it a good review for the time, but I wondered if it was that good?

Battle Squadron is, IMo, the BEST vertical scrolling shmup for teh Amiga. Its got that japanese feel to it. It's a shame there weren't many vert scrollers on our miggy It has the potential man!

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by andreas
But it might be useful to *not* "optimize" this and thus give someone with technical understanding a way to write such an image back to disk, for example if the original real disk is fucked someday in the future, he can still revert to this image.

Well, we all know this is not possible in most cases, at the moment, but that's what CAPS is there for.

so I could just rename Disk.1 to something.ADF and use it in the emulator without any problems!!
Isn't that wonderful?

No . I see where you're coming from now, it's all for the sake of lameulators!

[Codetapper]

Originally posted by andreas
Define "tamper".

To modify bytes INSIDE a file. Slicing the useless blank part of the end of a disk is not modifying the file if that part is never used.

(The following section applies to AmigaDOS disks only, not to alien formats!)

Only a complete twat would resize an AmigaDos disk because filenames are hashed to form a key which is used as a reference to jump to the files start position on a disk. Remaining sectors can be spread all over the disk so the only disks which have the end bits sliced off are NDos disks, not AmigaDos.

I am talking about NDos for this entire thread.

slicing out = tampering = modifying (in some way)

But it might be useful to *not* "optimize" this and thus give someone with technical understanding a way to write such an image back to disk, for example if the original real disk is fucked someday in the future, he can still revert to this image. If non-used tracks are removed, the image is non-standard and can be used in WHDload ONLY once and for all...

Again you are wrong. Take Stunt Car Racer with it's 450k Disk.1 file. Download Diskwiz from my website and type:

diskwiz Disk.1 df0: >NIL:

Reboot your amiga, lo and behold, Stunt Car Racer works (well the cracked version without the protection anyway).

If a game is 900k but only ever loads the first 200k, why the hell keep the other 700k?

Let's take another example. Some games store over 1Mb of data on the disk. Let's say that the game only uses the first 400k. By your logic you would release this as a 2 disk game because the original holds 1Mb of data and you can only fit 900k on a disk. Yet disk 2 would only have 100k and it would be complete garbage which the game didn't use.

Anyway, fortunately some disk images (e. g. Last Battle by Elite) were *NOT* touched by either imager nor WHDload, so I could just rename Disk.1 to something.ADF and use it in the emulator without any problems!!
Isn't that wonderful? If you *optimize* an AmigaDOS image, you cannot do this any longer because the emulator doesn't understand under-sized images!

That is an emulator problem, this has nothing to do with WHDLoad. Some people make ADF's which hold 82 tracks, so do these also not work in an emulator? If so, contact Toni and ask him to change the emulator. There is no need on NDos disks to force an ADF to be 901120 bytes.

One more point, people complain to the WHDLoad guys that a certain game won't run on a stock A1200 with 2Mb because it doesn't have enough memory. If we slice the disk image down so it can be played, we have others bitching at us that we have modified the game. We can't win

[gary]

re: WHDload images in emulators:

If WinUAE can't use < 900k .adf files then you could try transferring the image to an emulated floppy disk, then
use that for WinUAE. eg: transdisk Disk.1 df0:
I really hope WHDload programmers don't start writing install programs to suit emulator users. Real Amiga users should be
the priority.
WinUAE users could ask for a 'floppy queue' option which allows a stack of floppies to be queued up for use in df0: and a single keypress could cycle through the list.

re: BattleSquadron (to keep on topic)

BattleSquadron was sadly underrated when it was released. A very good game which looks as though it was written specifically for the Amiga rather than an Atari ST port (eg: S.W.I.V). Something about Banshee put me off. I think it may have been the score/lives/power panel that took up 1/4 of the left hand side of the screen. Battle Squadron was full screen and scrolled a little further left/right giving it less of a claustraphobic feeling.

Also - no disk swapping! Thats something that killed the enjoyment of many Amiga arcade games for me
Nebulus 2 - They took an excellent little puzzle game and inflated it to 3 or 4 disks

[andreas]

Originally posted by Codetapper
To modify bytes INSIDE a file. Slicing the useless blank part of the end of a disk is not modifying the file if that part is never used.

There might be a misunderstanding again.
There are two methods:

One disk (NDOS, 80 tracks) could have tracks 38, 56. 64, 67, and tracks 75-79 unused. It wasn't clear if you also make the disk smaller *inside* if tracks aren't used, or if you only touched tracks 75-79 in this case.

[LordIvo]

The original discussion is in a bit diffrent tone now , but what about latest shoot-em-up T-Zero ? Personally I haven't played this-one but from screenshots it looks awesome... :hoo

[Shatterhand]

I havent played T-Zero, but I do agree that Battle Squadron is the best vertical shmup available for Amiga, and it´s one of my fav shmups ever.

Great gameplay, great graphics, and some of the best music/sfx ever in a game.

[Codetapper]

Originally posted by andreas
There might be a misunderstanding again.
There are two methods:

One disk (NDOS, 80 tracks) could have tracks 38, 56. 64, 67, and tracks 75-79 unused. It wasn't clear if you also make the disk smaller *inside* if tracks aren't used, or if you only touched tracks 75-79 in this case.

DIC can only read part of a disk in one continuous section, so you could not have tracks you mentioned missing - purely because there is no command line options to do this!

The only way you can slice around an image is if you use RawDIC or a custom slave to build the disk - in which case you can remove whichever tracks you like.

In the odd case where a game loads from the start of a disk and then the very end and the middle is never used, I generally convert the game to files rather than disk images. Files are better as you can compress them yourself and of course less space means more files can be buffered in memory and poor 2Mb users can still play them!

And back on topic, Battle Squadron is an amazing game, very much underrated and has some awesome effects far ahead of it's time (eg. the semi-transparent aliens).

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by LordIvo
Personally I haven't played this-one but from screenshots it looks awesome... :hoo

Overrated. Tried the partially working demo, and it's an okay game that looks like a neogeo production.

[LordIvo]

Thanks for info Akira... actually i'm still keen to see a demo..

[7-Zark-7]

I have to say I'm very surprised about Battle Squadron. For a 1989 Amiga title it's stunning. Although the "stealth" predator aliens "look" great with that rippling effect,it makes it bloody difficult.
BTW-I don't know if you can call it underrated, I seem to recall Zzap giving it 89% or thereabouts. However, why Amiga owners didn't buy it in greater volumes at the time is a mystery. I wonder if its developers made any more Amiga games?

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by LordIvo
Thanks for info Akira... actually i'm still keen to see a demo..

Download it from www.clickboom.com. But I think it's the same version as mine, and it is extremely bugged (doesn't even run well on my real Amiga)

[Feltzkrone]

I've uploaded a two disk version of Battle Squadron cracked by Tarkus Team.

- in WinUAE use Kickstart 1.2, all other version I tried crashed the game after the first screen flashing
- on screen flashing change the disk (not after the first flashing, on this point just wait one second and loading is continued)
- this version shows the intro (some pictures telling a story) after the titlepic, the tic version didn't show it at all, not even after the second appearance (after first one and demo) of the options menu

I hope this is what you were searching for...

EDIT:

Oh Shit! Ever tried to run the second disk? It's the game Stormlord cracked by Vision Factory, so in fact we are
a) missing the first disk
b) having a battle squadron crack which was one-disked

I'll try out if it's about b) (i hope so...), but even if not - we've got the intro...

EDIT2:

Shit, case a) is true! After the first level the screen is flashing and doesn't accept the obviously wrong disk number two. Anyway, we've got the intro on disk

If anyone got an ADF where the string "TT02" (the game checks for that string when requesting disk 2) appears on the third absolute sector (offset $400) please upload this disk.

[Big-Byte]

Why dont you try out the Battle Squadron version cracked by Captain Paranoia? It was definately cracked from an original which only came on one disk.

I remember watching the intro too...

Its in tosec collection and also in my Big-Byte / capt Paranoia adfs directory on my ftp.