Posted By
Litwr
on 2007-09-01
02:00:38
|  Mystical D64-image disappearance
I've found very odd thing - D64 image of the Typing Professor is missed at emucamp and c64rulez.  I downloaded this image several years ago. This program provides many good exersizes for fingers.  The record at the emucamp download page (plus4.emucamp.com/software/Typing_Professor) contains note "For the C64 and Plus/4 is disk version and C16 version on 2 tapes" but only links to TAP-images.
This original disk is copy protected by one bad sector - information about it is strored into additional bad sectors map of D64-format. It's sad but this is not supported by the most advanced emulators (Yape and Plus4emu). However, Vice and 'Forever?' (its new 1.37 version is just released) may run it.
The link to the Typing Professor disk image is
http://litwr.boom.ru/tprof.html
I hope Csabo will take it to the emucamp...
BTW this site is another hiden link which may be interesting (plus4 mail archive)
http://litwr.boom.ru/p4ma.html
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Posted By
Luca
on 2007-09-01
08:41:36
 | Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
Great contribution! Added quickly, thanks.
Ah the second .zip looks like broken...
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Posted By
IstvanV
on 2007-09-01
08:44:18
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
I may be able to implement the bad sectors feature. I assume it is needed when the D64 file has a table with number of sectors bytes length at the end (e.g. file size is 175531 bytes instead of 174848, as in the case of Five Magics) ? Until now, I have simply ignored that extra information. How should the disk emulation handle the bad sectors (for example, is it enough to just encode it as all zeros when converting the track to GCR format) ?
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Posted By
Chronos
on 2007-09-01
08:54:30
 | Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
..and if someone made a crack for that stuff?
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Posted By
Luca
on 2007-09-01
16:49:13
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
The Chronos'answer made me think about this fact: a C64 scene has groups liek Nostalgia and Hokuto Forces which are extremely specialized in crackings. Would be great on our scene too, of course when you can offer a real "complete service", and not only a skimpy infinite lives feature...
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Posted By
IstvanV
on 2007-09-02
09:48:02
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
I was able to get it loading with some modifications to the plus4emu source code to use the bad sector info. However, it seems to run in NTSC mode. Is that the expected behavior ?
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2007-09-04
04:06:03
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
Vice & 'forever?' can run it in PAL mode too.
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Posted By
IstvanV
on 2007-09-04
06:12:59
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
Maybe those do not emulate the PAL/NTSC switching bit in $FF07 ? You can try typing POKE 65287,72 in various emulators, and see what happens. Anyway, since Typing Professor is an US release, it is not surprising that it uses NTSC mode. Actually, the description on the above linked page does say that it is NTSC only. So, you need to load an NTSC configuration in plus4emu to make it work correctly.
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2007-09-04
08:14:23
| Re: Mystical D64-image disappearance
[to Luca] I'm very sorry. The hidden link is 4 years old so I forgot that it is not really ZIP-format. You should rename file to p4ma.tar.bz2 - my free server doesn't allow such extension. This archive has also one mystery - several entries are removed...
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