Some PC/DOS game floppies, anything worth uploading?

[hamartetikon]

Hello, it's my first post here.

Just dug my old storagebox of MS-DOS/PC-floppies. Anything worth archiving?

• V for Victory - Utah Beach
• Spaceward Ho!
• Dyna Blaster
• Global Conquest
• Populous II
• Carrier Command [PC/AMIGA DUAL FORMAT]
• Crisis in Kremlin
• Creatures [Egg Disk]
• SimEarth
• Valhalla [later published as Shareware under name Ragnarok]
• Theatre of War
• VGA Planets [Beta floppy set]
• Football Manager 2
• Empire Deluxe
• Special Forces
• The Global Dilemma: Guns or Butter
• A-Train
• Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge
• Silpheed Demo Disk (bundled with IBM PS/1 Joystick/Audio Interface)
• Imperium
• F-19 Stealth Fighter
• SimLife
• King's Quest [v 2.0F]
• King's Quest II [v 2.2]

Some floppies have no box or did not have box to begin with. Some floppies got big boxes, some have small boxes.

Let me know if there's anything interesting and I will find out how to proceed with scanning etc.

[mrpijey]

From what I see all of it is interesting since it's original. Even if we have some of these games we still need proper floppy dumps as well as scans of the floppies, so if you can provide these it would be great!

[Darkstar]

If you need them scanned / dumped (with a KryoFlux) and don't mind sending them away for a while, contact me and we can work something out

[hamartetikon]

Ok! There is some obstacles tho, I have no scanner available, so I will have to wait until I find someone willing to scan these, could take months especially when I'm going soon for a 4 week trip abroad. Also the empty boxes are not located at my home, but a separate storage. But step by step.

Disk image files I can make anytime, but do you recommend that I wait until I have scans of the floppies and boxes before submitting anything?

[mrpijey]

If possible take up Darkstar on his offer and allow him to loan your floppies for proper dumps and scan. I can also help you if it's closer or cheaper.

[hamartetikon]

Hi again,

I managed to find a suitable scanner and I visited my storage, brought all the game boxes to my home and now I am slowly scanning all the boxes whenever I have time.

I already made images from all the floppies with USB Floppy drive/WinImage. Unfortunately few had read errors (Carrier Command, Empire Deluxe, F19, KQ2, KQ3, KQ1). I will upload only those games that had no disk errors.

I first focused on Darklands to make my first FTP upload. If it is OK, I'll continue with same method with other games.

I read your instructions about making a contribution and tried to follow the instructions as close as possible.

I carefully scanned everything except manual book inner pages, as I found a good quality scan PDF from some web page (http://www.mocagh.org/miscgame/darklands-manual.pdf)
I put the manual book and official clue book into "Extras" folder inside the 7z-archive (please ignore the Extras folder if I am supposed to contribute 100% my own scans).
All the other images I scanned myself.

"Darklands (1992) (3.5''-1.44MB) [English].7z" upload is now ready in my upload folder. Let me know if there's any problems with it.

[mrpijey]

Scans look very good, but please don't crop the cover scans, just leave them with some margins around them. And don't forget the top/bottom sides . Everything else looks great!

Even if you have some bad floppies, would you mind still scanning and dumping them and mark the bad floppies and sets as "incomplete"? We would still like the scans, covers and working data since someone else might have the missing pieces in the future. And we may also be able to reconstruct the bad data by replacing the damaged data files from folder dumps and other sets. These old floppy games are rare so we are trying to save as much as possible before it all goes bad.

Thanks for uploading!

[Darkstar]

If you send me the broken floppies I can try and see what I can salvage with a proper KryoFlux dump.

[hamartetikon]

Now I managed to get some time to rescan Darklands images with margins. I already uploaded it to my FTP upload folder. How does it look like this time?

The top and bottom of the box are plain black blank without any text or any illustrations or markings, should I scan them anyway? If blank sides are really required I will upload 3rd version soon.

Otherwise the Darklands is ready and I can move to process the next game.

@Darkstar, thanks for the offer! At this point I have very limited time and money to use for hobby like this and cannot mail the floppies around the world. I will keep your offer in mind and get back to you if it becomes an convenient option. In which country do you live? I live in Finland.

EDIT: Ah I see you (Darkstar) live in southern Germany. Not too far if there is need to mail the floppies at some later point.

[hamartetikon]

I started my next PC-game-dump + box scan: Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire (SMACX), the expansion for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Although it is not on the photo in my original post and it is not on a floppy but on CD-ROM, I thought it is good to learn to use the Alcohol 120%.

My problem is that if I try to dump it with A120%, the dump is full of errors, maybe every sector is faulty. When I copy the files from CD, they are copied without any errors. So it must be a copy protection that gives me the errors. I googled SMACX and copy protection, I found out that the CD is probably protected with SafeDisc.

I tried to dump the CD with all 3 SafeDisc Datatype presets that are on the A120%, no luck I got only abundance of errors. I tried SecuROM datatype and the dump aborted in the beginning.

Do you have any advice how I could make an image of the Alien Crossfire CD?
What information should I provide to make it easier to give an answer?

I already have all the scans of the box and of the media + all the files from the CD, should I zip them up and upload or should I wait until there is a way to dump the CD properly?

[mrpijey]

Even if you get reading errors it most likely copies just fine anyway. This is exactly why we want the logs with the dumps as well.

Try this: Dump the disc with A120 with the DPM setting to max, mount the dumped image and then compare the contents (md5 hash?) with a manual copy of the original disc... and see if the files are OK. If they are they everything is fine. You can't do much else at this point anyway. But as long as we got the intact data and the logs we'll be fine. You can also note for these titles what protection is used.

[hamartetikon]

Thanks for the info.

Oh yeah, even though there were countless errors on the log file the CD image made using the Data Position Measurement checked and then max level seems to be functioning OK. I mounted the image and it seems exactly the same as the real CD. There are so many files that I started to wonder what would be handy method to compare 2 CD/DVD discs (real disc or image)?

I found many programs but none that would do easily checksum of the whole disc, not individual files.

What tool (for Windows) would you recommend to create checksums of whole discs and compare them?

I could zip all the visible files and folders from each disc and then make checksums of the zip files and compare them... but that does not feel very practical method.

[mrpijey]

I don't know really, I use a file manager (Total Commander) that allows me to compare two folders file by file or create a single hash file out of every file and folder on the volume. But what you can do is just take out a bunch of files (largest ones) and hash those, and compare those only. If you got so many errors then it should crop up somewhere... But I don't think there are any errors with the files.

[hamartetikon]

That was helpful idea, mrpijey! Alas, I did not manage to find 64bit checksum plugin for Total Commander, only for 32bit version... I was too tired to uninstall 64-bit version of TC and re-install 32bit version just for plugin compatibility. Then I tried Directory Opus (similar file manager as TC) with no luck, although there should be a method to create checksums, but I could not make checksum of the whole disc, only individual files...

But your tip helped me to look into right direction...

The solution was nearer than I thought and I can recommend it for anyone who wants to compare mounted image to real CD/DVD:
7Zip has in-built addition for explorer context menu:

Code: Select all

CRC SHA >
	CRC-32
	CRC-64
	SHA-1
	SHA-256
	*

These context menu items work for directories and all subdirectories as well as for drive letters = CD-ROM drive and mounted images.

Anyway, the CRC-32 and CRC-64 of real CD matched with respective hashes of the *.mds image I dumped with SafeDisc -setting (Data Position Measurement - Precision: High, DPM: maximum speed) as per your recommendation! There is actual screenshot of the hashes of real CD-ROM and dumped SafeDisc image side by side in the zip-file: "7zip CRC-64 hash match.PNG".

It took me whole night to scan the "Easy Guide" + the media + the box, so I scanned only front cover and rear cover of the manual.
My scanner would have been too small for the 2-sided A1-sized(!) Technologies/Benefits of Technologies charts, even for smaller pieces, the folds that had formed in 18 years would have been impossible to level for scanner...

Instead I downloaded high-quality PDF versions of the manual and both sides of Technologies/Benefits of Technologies charts and put those three files in "extras" folder.
Again, feel free to delete the extras folder if it violates the BA-policy to put material downloaded from internet within the zip. Every other file was scanned/dumped by me from my own physical copy of the SMACX.

I just uploaded SMACX to my FTP upload folder.

Let me know if there is anything you wish to be made differently for both of my uploads, Darklands and SMACX.

[mrpijey]

Checksum plugin? Select files, choose Files > Create checksum file(s)... it's a native function in TC...

As for items too large for the scanner... scan it in segments with overlapping parts and I can put it together manually.

I will check your uploads as soon as possible.

[hamartetikon]

Checksum plugin? Select files, choose Files > Create checksum file(s)... it's a native function in TC...

Ah, I missed it in the files menu... Thought I need a plugin. After I read this message, I tried it, but I get errors whenever I try to select the location for the saved checksum files. (it would not accept standard paths to different folders as "C:\Temp" and not even drive letter C: or any other letter)
Anyway 7Zip checksum tool on any file explorer tool's context menu works fine with any file manager for me.

As for items too large for the scanner... scan it in segments with overlapping parts and I can put it together manually.

Yeah that I could scan the poster in segments occurred to me before I wrote the last message, but I realized that a *thick* and folded 18 years old poster is not very easy to scan with A4 scanner that has cover that only opens 90 degrees. Sadly it proved to be the case; it took me whole day to scan both sides and the quality is not good + the poster condition downgraded from mint to used. Next time I find a poster to scan, I will take it to my work and use fast A3+ scanner instead of my slow A4 scanner.

Scanner edges are naturally higher than the glass, that means that the edges of each scanned segment rise from the glass and distort the edges, because the paper is so thick and cannot be pressed to maintain the contact to the glass. I was aware of this from start, so I let each scan overlap the previous few centimeters to be sure that you don't have to use distorted parts when you put the jigsaw puzzle together.

Some rotation adjustment is needed for every picture. I did not touch the pictures so that the scanned file quality would not degrade.

Anyway now both sides are scanned and zipped as "Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire (1999-11-01) (CD-ROM) [English] - Poster Scans.zip" and are waiting for upload and to be merged with the zip-file I already contributed (Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire (1999-11-01) (CD-ROM) [English].zip).

I tried to login to upload FTP-account 15 minutes ago with same saved login information I have used earlier without problems, but login did not work, it just asks password over and over.

[mrpijey]

When it comes to posters it's a lot more difficult yeah. What you can do is spread it out on the floor, flatten it and take a very good photo of it... just so we can keep it for reference. The overlapping scan only works for stuff that covers 2-3 A4-pages, not posters...

As for the login, just try to relock your IP or change your password and try again.