Searching for Sherlock Holmes - Consulting Detective CDTV

[musashi5150]

After some head-scratching we now have a sernet up and running Fingers crossed for Phase #2

[retrosale.co.uk]

Good luck, Gavin!

If you succeed, I'll send you a free copy of ST Archipelagos as a reward!

[thor]

Great Gavin
If you succeed, can you share your findings what caused the problems/how the data is read with us?

Nice offer Dave, if he gets a working image, the reward is well deserved

[musashi5150]

Fingers crossed guys, I need to get my coder's hat on now Thanks for the offer of the reward Dave

If my idea works then I will share it with everyone (and the sourcecode / diskimage), but I don't want to jinx anything at the moment. I think it'll take me a couple of days to code everything up and I'll report back then

[DamienD]

Go musashi5150, go

[musashi5150]

Well, I've coded a first revision of my CDTV to A4000 dumping program. I thought it would take me longer as I've never done any Amiga-system-legal C coding before... normally stick to the metal banging

To test it I thought I would dump something I can verify. So I am currently dumping the first datatrack (~30MB) over serial to the A4000. I can then check this file against the one my PC imaged to see if it's a load of tosh

It's currently running along happily and certainly seems to be making a file of 'something' in the A4000 ramdisk. We will see tomorrow what it is. Then if it's any good I will make a change to the program to dump CDXL tracks and we will all keep our fingers crossed.

It's going to take quite a while... dumping speed is approx 1 CD sector (2048 bytes) every 2 secs or so running over 19200 serial

[musashi5150]

For the interested I've taken a screenshot of the dumper in action



Sorry for the shit quality, but the CDTV is running on my PC TVCard. You can make out it saying "Reading sector xxxx / 19587...OK" and then "Dumping sector...OK".

Not particularly interesting I know, but thought I'd share it with you guys.

[nujack]

Amazing! Good news!!!

[viddi]

FANTASTIC!!!

[musashi5150]

Thanks guys. I'm still in the process of transferring the data so I can compare. I think it should be ok though. You'll be the first to know when I have some news.

[musashi5150]

Datatrack dump is good

Now I just need to make a few changes to the program to read XL tracks - I'll probably do that tomorrow. It involves working out some CBM documentation and doing some work with lists. Should be ok.

I swapped to using an A600 as the imaging machine instead of my A4000 as it's more 'disposable' and I don't mind leaving it on for days on end. But I have discovered the pain of serial transfers

If I just dump the tracks to my A600 2.5" HD would it be possible to plug it to my PC via my USB HD controller to get the files back with WinUAE ? I transferred 30MB today at 1.2KB/sec and I can't imagine what 150MB x 3 is going to be like!

[DamienD]

Very good news musashi5150

You are the master

[thor]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

Now I just need to make a few changes to the program to read XL tracks - I'll probably do that tomorrow. It involves working out some CBM documentation and doing some work with lists. Should be ok.

Do you use the CDTV directory of the Developer CD as reference? Anything else?

Originally Posted by musashi5150

But I have discovered the pain of serial transfers

You explicitly asked for it, masoshi5150

Hope it works out what you're doing and thanks for the progress reports.

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by thor

Do you use the CDTV directory of the Developer CD as reference? Anything else?

Yep, I'm just using the 2.1 developer CD and a couple of RKM/OS reference books I have here. There is a particularly useful code example by Carl Sassenrath (the master ) called 'dumpsector'.

This just shows how to do CMD_READ style stuff using cdtv.device and IOStdReq. That's fine for datatracks, but XL tracks won't work with that. There is a separate command 'CDTV_READXL' that is for videotracks. It doesn't work quite the same, but once I figure it out that's what I'm going to use.

I think the only difference for me is that it was designed for spooling and so uses memory lists to dump data instead of a fixed address. It is just literally a case of getting my head around it

As for the pain of serial transfers I'm not going to worry about that right now. I'm going to get the tracks onto the A600 and then try it with WinUAE

[fisken uno]

Good luck, musashi! And thanks for all the hard work you put into this one

[musashi5150]

Hit a stumbling block at the moment. I've changed the dump program to use the CDTV_READXL command from cdtv.device, but it keeps reporting a read error on all videotrack sectors.

I must be missing something... I'll keep trying and hopefully find a solution. If I can't get it working I'll have to dig out ReSource and see if I can find the animplayer in the game code.

[thor]

Did you try running CDTV\CDTVTOOLS-11\CDXL\XL.C example? Strange case this Sherlock Holmes CD Thanks for reporting, hope you'll find something

[musashi5150]

Guys, I just cant get the XL reading function of cdtv.device to transfer any data - just errors every time. I've tried it with sectors all over the disc and just am not having any luck.

I've upped the programs and sourcecode to the zone if anybody wants to take a look. I've been using the 2.1 Developer CD as a resource.

Maybe I'm missing something?

The program I can't make work right is "dumpxlsector.c" DoIO just returns an error and no data is loaded.

http://download.abime.net/zone/XL.LHA

EDIT: Been compiling with SAS/C 6.58 - but should work with any Amiga compiler with AMIGA.LIB. And don't remake about untidy coding - it was quick and dirty work that only I was meant to be playing with

[DamienD]

Thank you so much for your hard work and research musashi5150

Well done

[thor]

Just had a look on your source. Looks good, except that you probably should use SendIO() instead of DoIO() for the CD_READXL command (don't forget to cleanup with AbortIO() and WaitIO() then). But I don't if that changes anything, but the examples I've seen use that. And check for the return codes. Can't find anything else that could be wrong, if that doesn't work the next option would be resourcing the animplayer