[Vangar]

Quote

There was a tablet that used absolute position

So does mine. Its all about drivers and setup.

Very interesting indeed.

[Elusive]

I almost fellout of my chair looking at ICEKnight's sketch, the Digitizer unit looks amazingly similar to a Vectrex!

Very cool info

[ICEknight]

LocalH, on May 24 2005, 07:03 PM, said:

ICEknight: If you're in regular contact with Payne, can you show him these screenshots and ask him if the interface depicted looks familiar to him?

Sure. The "Sonic closeup" pic certainly looks how he described it to me, with the smaller grids for each group of 8x8 pixels.

Then there was another program in the NEC computers (maybe it was D-Paint?) that didn't feature the grid and confused the hell out of everybody that had worked with the Digitizers.

[StephenUK]

ICEknight, on May 25 2005, 03:16 PM, said:

LocalH, on May 24 2005, 07:03 PM, said:

ICEknight: If you're in regular contact with Payne, can you show him these screenshots and ask him if the interface depicted looks familiar to him?

Sure. The "Sonic closeup" pic certainly looks how he described it to me, with the smaller grids for each group of 8x8 pixels.

Then there was another program in the NEC computers (maybe it was D-Paint?) that didn't feature the grid and confused the hell out of everybody that had worked with the Digitizers.

As you mentioned before, the disks that were incompatable with a PC may well have been Amiga. D-Paint could be referring to Deluxe Paint, which was the main art tool for the Amiga.

[ICEknight]

StephenUK, on May 25 2005, 04:24 PM, said:

As you mentioned before, the disks that were incompatable with a PC may well have been Amiga. D-Paint could be referring to Deluxe Paint, which was the main art tool for the Amiga.

Heh, last Saturday I told him about the Amiga formatted disks and how it's possible to extract their data with some special program and he agreed on how nice would it be to recover the stuff from the disks he still has.


So if anybody has that program and knows how to use it, that would help a lot. No wierd experiments please, as we don't want to risk the data inside those disks...

[Hivebrain]

I don't think Amiga disks can be read without specical hardware. You could connect an Amiga to your PC and read the disk with Amiga Explorer (http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/).

[Darkon]

There is an alternative way, its possible for an amiga to read dos formatted disks so if you format a floppy on the pc, its possible to transfer files from an amiga disk onto the dos formatted disk, then use that disk in a PC, I know its a long route round but it works.

Theres a program in workbench called XDOS that has to be moved to the system directory for the amiga to read dos disks.
*edit* It can also be known as crossdos

This post has been edited by Darkon: 25 May 2005 - 06:55 PM

[Jayenkai]

You can use an Amiga with Multi-Dos, to transfer the files from Amiga disks, onto PC disks, then grab them from those disks on the PC side..
Nice and easy..

^ Yeah, what he said! ^

This post has been edited by Jayenkai: 25 May 2005 - 06:00 PM

[LocalH]

I have an Amiga 3000, and unless it's some kind of protected format (not likely), it would be trivial to read the disks to compressed DMS images and then use WinUAE to write them to an ADF file, of which I would probably distribute both. After all, it would be best to keep the disks archived in as close a format as possible to the original, and for your average non-protected Amiga disk, DMS and ADF serve that purpose. The files can then be extracted from the images and used outside of the Amiga environment, of course. It's the same thing as preserving the exact binary of a prototype, basically. Especially with data this important to us.

Of course, this only applies if they are indeed Amiga disks. Do we know for sure if they are Amiga disks? If they're not, it's unlikely I can do anything with them (although the Classic Amiga Preservation Society does have a tool that can do a 'raw' dump, it all depends on the real format of the disks).

If you want my assistance, feel free to PM me. If they are truly Amiga disks, I'd be more than happy to help them be made available.

This post has been edited by LocalH: 25 May 2005 - 08:15 PM

[LOst]

Remember that floppy disk falls appeart after they have been used. Almost every floppy disk I have have bad sectors on them. The data must be saved from those disks before it is too late, but you have to operate carefully!

[Jayenkai]

I think Amiga is definately our friend, here..
Assuming they are NOT 1.4Mb disks, though.. I don't think I know of any Amigas that handle those..

Use XCopy/DCopy (OMG! I forgot the name!!) to make a direct sector-by-sector clone of the disks. Then only use the backups.
It shouldn't matter what the format of the disks is, either, since a big enough root (route?) through Aminet should provide a suitable Disk format Dos.library. Then it's simply a case of transferring the files over, and faffing about with them on the PC side.

[LocalH]

Well, my plan was just to DMS it straight from the original. Reason being, if there are read errors and I have to try multiple times, it'll happen either way. Once I've got a full DMS without errors, I can then duplicate as necessary. I just transferred 6 of my old disks over, and they gave a few read errors along the way, but after one or two additional attempts, I was able to get an error-free dump. If it's not something that DMS can handle, then I'm not sure how I'd archive the disk (getting the files off is nice, but I want to preserve the actual disk structure, as it is now - as I said earlier, it's the same as I would treat a prototype).

There are high density Amiga drives that can handle 1.76MB, but they were not all that common in my experience. I never saw any Amiga software distributed on 1.76MB disks.

Of course, my first plan of action may just be to make a dump with the aforementioned CAPS tool - it reads the disk at a lower level and can handle a wider variety of non-standard disks more accurately than DMS can.

Basically, I'll stick the disk in (write protected, of course), and simply do a dir to see if the disk is standard AmigaDOS - if so, DMS will be more than sufficient (and I can also provide ADF, although WinUAE does have read-only DMS support), and it will be trivial to take that image and extract the files on the PC.

Personally, I was always a big XCopy fan. Quite a good copier. Fast as hell, too, with standard format disks (even if NDOS).

[Vangar]

You can make an exact preserved copy with Disk2FDI. I can't be bothered explaining it, I already PMed Iceknight about it.

[Qjimbo]

Yeah I've mentioned this before, images of these disks have to be made. This will effectively turn the disks into roms, which also could mean deleted graphics that haven't yet been overwritten may still be present on the disk. But yeah what everyone else has said here seems accurate, there doesn't appear to be a way of reading the disks direct, though my Acorn Risc PC can read amiga disks fine... iunno. Here's an article about it
http://www.amigafore...m/kb/3-118.html

[ICEknight]

QJimbo, on May 27 2005, 08:11 AM, said:

Yeah I've mentioned this before, images of these disks have to be made. This will effectively turn the disks into roms, which also could mean deleted graphics that haven't yet been overwritten may still be present on the disk.

Yeah, that was one of the points for making exact images of these disks. There might be many different revisions of the art hidden in the deleted sectors.

Thanks a lot.