English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Greaseweazel/SCP and IPF conversion questions

rhester72 · 12 February 2023, 14:24

Brand new owner of a Greaseweazel v4 and attempting to preserve a handful of NTSC titles that to the best of my knowledge don't appear _anywhere_ (SPS/CAPS or TOSEC).

One of them is The Killing Game Show NTSC. In trying to dump this, I've come across something rather strange. If I dump to SCP with defaults, the dump doesn't work (in the latest WinUAE) - it reads from tracks 2 to 6, then loops back and does it again to infinity. Booting the physical floppy from WinUAE works fine, so it seems pretty obvious that it's likely a weak-bits protection method.

Here's the strange thing - the default for gw is revs=3. This dump attempt does _not_ work:

gw.exe read --drive=B KillingGameShow_NTSC_Disk1.scp

but this one *does*, _consistently_:

gw.exe read --drive=B --revs=3 KillingGameShow_NTSC_Disc1.scp

even though they should be the same dump method (and indeed, the resulting file sizes are very close to the same). What's up with that?

Next, conversion to IPF format...I'm aware that the CAPS library has very limited weak-bits support (which is as I understand it the reason why even KGS PAL doesn't appear in IPF). Is there any means at all of doing so manually? I ask because my target supports IPF but not SCP unfortunately.

Sorry for the newbie dumper questions...my intentions are good! =) (I also acquired Dragon's Lair NTSC for preservation but sadly disk 1 appears to be damaged, or at least neither dumps nor direct floppy boot work after the initial stage, and multiple dump attempts resulted in vastly different numbers of flux readings initially that prevented boot at all, so I think the disk is screwed.)

If I can ever figure all this out, more will follow and be happy shared for long-term preservation, obviously.

12 February 2023, 14:24	#1
rhester72 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: New York / USA Posts: 360	Greaseweazel/SCP and IPF conversion questions Brand new owner of a Greaseweazel v4 and attempting to preserve a handful of NTSC titles that to the best of my knowledge don't appear _anywhere_ (SPS/CAPS or TOSEC). One of them is The Killing Game Show NTSC. In trying to dump this, I've come across something rather strange. If I dump to SCP with defaults, the dump doesn't work (in the latest WinUAE) - it reads from tracks 2 to 6, then loops back and does it again to infinity. Booting the physical floppy from WinUAE works fine, so it seems pretty obvious that it's likely a weak-bits protection method. Here's the strange thing - the default for gw is revs=3. This dump attempt does _not_ work: gw.exe read --drive=B KillingGameShow_NTSC_Disk1.scp but this one does, _consistently_: gw.exe read --drive=B --revs=3 KillingGameShow_NTSC_Disc1.scp even though they should be the same dump method (and indeed, the resulting file sizes are very close to the same). What's up with that? Next, conversion to IPF format...I'm aware that the CAPS library has very limited weak-bits support (which is as I understand it the reason why even KGS PAL doesn't appear in IPF). Is there any means at all of doing so manually? I ask because my target supports IPF but not SCP unfortunately. Sorry for the newbie dumper questions...my intentions are good! =) (I also acquired Dragon's Lair NTSC for preservation but sadly disk 1 appears to be damaged, or at least neither dumps nor direct floppy boot work after the initial stage, and multiple dump attempts resulted in vastly different numbers of flux readings initially that prevented boot at all, so I think the disk is screwed.) If I can ever figure all this out, more will follow and be happy shared for long-term preservation, obviously.