Page 6 Issue Disk 55A, restoring the MENU
The Page 6 Issue Disks are an excellent collection of Atari software you can find at http://page6.org. The integrity of the disks is generally good, but I've found some disks with issues. Issue Disk 55A in particular is badly damaged, but we can try to at least partly fix it.
Sectors 232-235 and 642-706 are marked in the VTOC as free (and are empty on the disk), but they shouldn't be, and this damages some of the files:
- 232-235: INTRO.DAT. Let's just fix the sector links for now.
- 642-678: SPACE.OBJ: The shareware game GAUNTLET, we can restore this from a number of places.
- 679: MENU. The last bits of the MENU program have been lost.
- 680-692: MIDI: We can fix the links.
- 693-706: MIDI.TXT: Let's just fix the links.
Restoring the MENU program is possible with some cleverness. Similar menu programs end with DATA statements description,filename, and it appears we've cut off the word "SPACE GAUNT", so let's finish the file off with "LET,SPACE.OBJ" and a line 32768 which we normally find. That means we need to put the following bytes:
015310: SECTOR: 679: FILE: 0 4c 45 54 2c 53 50 41 43-45 2e 4f 42 4a 9b 00 80 LET,SPACE.OBJ... 10 0e 0e 19 0f 06 44 3a 4d-45 4e 55 16 .. .. .. .. .....D:MENU.....
And sure enough, with this the MENU comes back to life on this disk (previously the program crashed).
So we lost 69 sectors and we're able to restore 39 of them. INTRO.DAT remains damaged, and the MIDI files are completely lost, but at least the MENU works again.
So what's the source of the damage here? My suspicion is that a disk copier believed the VTOC and simply omitted those sectors. We'll never know for sure...
id55a.atr
0 Comments
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.