Help me ! Problem of a game running with PCE.
Hi,
I dumped a game "Friendlyware P.C. Arcade" and tried to get it working with PCE.
It's keydisk copy protection seems pass but doesn't work properly after select A~I.
I then got a cracked diskimage of this game via internet to do some test.
It works fine with DOSBox but still doesn't work with PCE.
Is this a bug of PCE ? Can anyone get it working and share the setting file ?
Best regard,
coolhaken
I dumped a game "Friendlyware P.C. Arcade" and tried to get it working with PCE.
It's keydisk copy protection seems pass but doesn't work properly after select A~I.
I then got a cracked diskimage of this game via internet to do some test.
It works fine with DOSBox but still doesn't work with PCE.
Is this a bug of PCE ? Can anyone get it working and share the setting file ?
Best regard,
coolhaken
Comments
Can you send the KF image of it from your original media?
Cracked image seems to work on PCE
But unfortunately, this is not the original floppy. It was gone.
This is a backup copy written by CopyWrite.
To ibmpc5150 :
Can you show your setting file ?
Best regard,
coolhaken
Unfortunately, it doesn't work on PCE too.
https://mega.nz/#!691VzQ5B!dlqNIFp_fd7i ... kjR9brKfWA
This is my setup cfg of pce-ibmpc.cfg
It will not be so helpful.
It doesn't work like the copy protected version.
I think this is not problem of copy protection track.
This seems to be a bug of PCE.
But you said a cracked image works, I am curious about the version you tried.
Can you point the link of that version ?
Best regard,
coolhaken
The KF image you linked to worked perfectly on a real computer, but failed in PCE. After the menu, it would just sit there when starting any of the games.
Since the unprotected one worked, I would guess that you have indeed run in to a compatiblity issue with PCE. If the unprotected and your KF image are the same version, then I would assume it is disk-system related.
The image in the KF file uses Deleted Data Address Marks on protected sectors instead of normal address marks. Normal IBM PCs supposedly won't read those, so they must be using some trick to read the data.
BTW, your KF image has a sector read error on Track 30, head zero, sector 6. This is not part of the copy protection. (plotted in the KF tool you can see a line of "noise") There is probably some damage or dirt on the disk you read from. You might want to carefully clean the disk and try again. This read error does not seem to have anything to do with the above problems.
I wonder your copied (by Copywrite) disk works on real PC (XT 8088 based).
At least this game seems not to work on 80386 or higher PC.
Your copied game seems to be early version than unprotected image.
My real 8088 had broken for a long time.
But SomeGuy tried it and said it worked perfectly on a real computer.
To SomeGuy :
I did notice this flaw on 30/0/6, and I did carefully clean my disk and try to redump many times but without luck.
The uploaded KF image is the best one.
Ok, I understand.
Unfortunately it is impossible to recover Track 30/0/6.
Because cracked or another image is different from your version.
Can you redump and upload it by KF again?
I'll check the difference on Track 30/0/6
I hope you to dump it as four times and upload dumped image with 4 times.
I have a question.
Is it possible to dump your damaged (gone) original disk by KF?
I hadn't noticed before, but apparently the data begin/deleted data mark is included for the CRC. Thankfully the PCE tools can set that bit.
Tried that on three different 8088 based machines here, and it worked. Anything else and it would not boot properly. I suspect this is another case like Harvard Presentation Graphics 1.0 where the FDC must be a very close copy of IBMs.
Like FM encoding, the IBM PC never officially used the deleted data mark. That was actually an obsolete feature used by much earlier systems that just happened to be present in the FDC chip. I guess the idea was that it was possible to check for used/unused space on a disk without querying the file system. The only machines that I know of off hand that used that were earlier TRS-80s.
Now, I have just 2 versions of it with same copy protection.
(Track 0-5 / Track 8-30)
Don't know why 4 dumps are needed. The total size will be about 100MB.
Upload speed of my ADSL is very low.
I remember the KF image contains 5 revolution(s) by default.
Isn't that enough for analyze ?
About th original disk, I said "gone" means it disappeared. So I can't dump it.
To SomeGuy :
Thank you for the fixed image. But it still doesn't work in PCE.
Since the un-fixed KF image works fine on a real computer. Don't know what's the effect of the new image(s) versus my KF image.
BTW, can you teach me how to calculate the CRC value ?
Oh, I really didin't know. Sorry.
>Upload speed of my ADSL is very low.
>I remember the KF image contains 5 revolution(s) by default.
>Isn't that enough for analyze ?
In this case, Sector 30/0/6 is bad.
It is not enough to find the bad sector 30/0/06 which is bad or variable.
I don't know the KF, but I always dumps bad or modified disks 2 ~ 4 times by Teledisk or TransCopy to find and fix the problem.
>>About th original disk, I said "gone" means it disappeared. So I can't dump it.
Oops, sorry. I didn't know, hehehe.
Yes, this is issue of emulation "read deleted data" FDC command on PCE.
The author seems to be working on implementing it.
I dumped it using KF 3 times. This is the converted .psi images.
https://mega.nz/#!LkRCxBDB!y58nX6RbsWLC ... OTtddeXH3w
11.psi means dump1 and revolution 1, 22.psi means dump2 and revolution 2, so on and so forth ...
Note that dump1 and dump2 use the same floppy driver, dump3 uses another floppy drive.
Thanks very much.
I've attached both version of PCArcade
https://mega.nz/#!mp8FAQiK!m8r9YEM91yHw ... VKSg8eP808
V1.PSI <-- coolhaken disk version fixed by SomeGuy (Maybe original release?)
V2.PSI <-- Minor updated version. (Based on Cracked image, but I have CP2 / TD0 dump with copy protection.)
V1.PSI <-- coolhaken disk version fixed by SomeGuy (This must be later release, 07-02-83)
V2.PSI <-- Minor updated version. (Based on Cracked image, but I have CP2 / TD0 dump with copy protection. This version date seems to be 6-13-83)
At now new PCE version supports this game with copy protection (DEL-DAM, FDC implement of read deleted data command)
If you haven't already, you might try a 360k drive instead of the 1.2mb drive. However, in this case, the damaged area is large enough it probably won't help.
It is interesting to hear that PCE has been patched for that. This is one reason why everyone needs to dig up as much software as possible - emulators tend to omit functionality that they think nothing uses. Onece somebody finds a program that uses it, then there is a reason to make the emulators more complete.
Unfortunately most of PC relateted emulator doesn't support FDC handling via INT-13 correctly.
So software should be patched to run on PC emulatior.
But PCE doesn't demand to patch (crack) the software to run.
I also respect the author of PCE (Hampa), hehehe.