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Digitizer MK-III

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by ICEknight, May 24, 2005.

  1. Hivebrain

    Hivebrain

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    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/).
     
  2. Darkon

    Darkon

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    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
     
  3. Jayenkai

    Jayenkai

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    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! ^
     
  4. LocalH

    LocalH

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    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.
     
  5. LOst

    LOst

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    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!
     
  6. Jayenkai

    Jayenkai

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    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.
     
  7. LocalH

    LocalH

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    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).
     
  8. Vangar

    Vangar

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

    Qjimbo

    Your friendly neighbourhood lemming. Oldbie
    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.amigaforever.com/kb/3-118.html
     
  10. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    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.
     
  11. LocalH

    LocalH

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    Well, if they used DPaint on an Amiga, then the disk is a standard format and I can easily dump it with DMS, which covers all 80 tracks, and not just where the directory indicates data is stored. The only extra thing you'd be able to pull off would be files that had got deleted and not written over yet, as Jim said. With a standard unprotected disk, DMS will accurately represent the contents of the disk, such that it could easily be written to a different disk and be pretty much identical to the original disk. Actually, that'll be my first plan of action - make a backup disk using XCopy for my own personal software archive (I'd really, really like to keep the original disks but I doubt Tom wants to let go of them =P)

    Seriously, as I said, I have an Amiga sitting right here, and I can easily make DMS images (barring any read errors on the disks). Just get the disks to me, and if they are indeed standard Amiga disks without protection (I am 100% sure that if they are indeed Amiga disks, then they are unprotected), then I'll DMS the disk, and distribute the images completely unmodified. I'll also dig up some Amiga disk tools (DiskSalv was my favorite back in the day) and investigate to see if there are any deleted files that can be recovered (the chance is high - on a semi-unrelated note, it's a well known fact that early Kickstart disks have some deleted development files on them).

    Get me the disks. Unless they're not Amiga, I will make DMS images of the disks available. I've never used Disk2FDI, but that's quite overkill if these are standard disks (and I can't imagine them using DPaint with non-standard disks). I know other systems did have a port of DPaint (including, IIRC, the PC, Apple IIgs, and Atari ST), but the Amiga was most known for being the best machine to run DPaint on. And, if they did use DPaint, then the files should be standard format - either IFF ILBM images, standard DPaint brushes, or ANIM5. It'd be especially interesting if they used DPaint's animbrush feature to test how a sprite would look while animated - it's a breeze to create a simple mockup in DPaint using the automatic Move function with an animbrush.
     
  12. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Well, yeah, that's what they used for their mockups. They had access to all the available art and took whatever they wanted.

    As for the disks, the Disk2FDI method seems quite easy to pull, so I'll tell him about it before trying anything else.
     
  13. LocalH

    LocalH

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    Any word on this yet? I really want to look at these disks, even if I'm not the one who dumps them. This is historical data (to us), just like the prototype ROM.

    Also, I was a bit off when I said Disk2FDI was 'overkill' - I was assuming it to be a 'raw' dumping tool, similar to the CAPS tool mentioned earlier. I wasn't aware that it output standard ADF images.

    I can't wait to check out these disks - how many are there? Each disk can hold up to 880K in standard AmigaDOS format (901120 bytes per ADF), so there should be plenty of good stuff to examine.
     
  14. Qjimbo

    Qjimbo

    Your friendly neighbourhood lemming. Oldbie
    Yeah I'm equally bursting to see these disks :P It's funny because there's a tool to dump acorn ADFS 1.6MB and 800K disks from DOS, wonder why a similar thing can't be done for the amiga.
     
  15. LocalH

    LocalH

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    Well, that's basically what Disk2FDI is - the trouble is, to get it to read the disk in a 'raw' form, you have to use two drives, because the software basically begins writing to one of the drives (which you place a dummy disk into), and then forces the controller to switch to the other drive and begin reading. From "rawflopy.doc" (included within Disk2FDI):

    ICEknight, since the Disk2FDI process involves writing to a disk, you MUST make Mr. Payne aware that he should write-protect his original disks, just in case.
     
  16. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
    Well, I think he was actually the one who said about making sure to copy protect the disks before dumping the contents, so I guess he already has some idea about these computer thingies.

    I haven't had much time to contact him yet, and anyway I'm not sure if he's at home already... Maybe this weekend.



    So anyway, will this ADF include the deleted sectors or just the normal files?
     
  17. LocalH

    LocalH

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    ADFs generally include all 80 tracks (although you can create partial ADFs, they're more useful if you're working on a bog-standard A500, without enough storage to hold a whole 880KB image). It's a disk image, so it will hold everything. It should be a fairly simple matter to run something like DiskSalv on the disks and recover what's left of any deleted files (I've successfully done the same with Kickstart 1.0 disk images, which contain some of the same development files that are on the 27.5 "Workbench" disk, as well as a tiny snippet of the then-current OS source code).

    Regardless how you get the disks dumped, if you want me to, I can convert them from ADF to compressed DMS (which has much better support on the Amiga, and is directly supported in read-only with WinUAE). I recommend either doing that, or zipping the ADF and renaming it to an extension of ADZ (which are also directly supported in read-only with WinUAE). If there are a lot of truly empty sectors, or highly-compressible data, then the DMS/ADZ will be MUCH smaller than the uncompressed ADF (which will always be 901120 bytes for a standard AmigaDOS disk).
     
  18. As I don't have any technical knowledge to add on this very interesting topic, I'll put here an interesting fact, much like a "did you know" thing, base on what Jayenkai said.

    Amiga is similar to "Amigo". Both mean "Friend" in portuguese.

    [/did you know?]
     
  19. LocalH

    LocalH

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    Yes, I knew that (Spanish as well, as I learned in school). I believe that's where the designers got the name from, IIRC.
     
  20. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
    And that's how you say "female friend" in Spanish. There were many jokes about it back then, over here. =P



    By the way, I just sent Tom the program and the frontend for easier use.