ijor

None of the "classic" Pacman variants (Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacman Jr.) were released for the ST. The more "modern" ones, PacLand and Pacmania were the only official releases. But a bunch of Pacman clones, some quite good ones are available.

PP might give permission for the conversion (assuming he has the rights). But of course that he will never give permission for any kind of selling. It doesn't necessarily have to be a nominal amount. But to make it 100% legal is quite complicated. "Making sure the buyer have an original" is not enough, that doesn't make it legal at all. The only possible way would be to sell a program (and/or hardware) that converts the original disks to the converted form. And this still could be controversial and not fully legal depending on the country.

Doesn't seem to be a hard disk check. I would expect it would try a read and not a write. Several drive enhancements use this style of command for reading/writing to their extended buffer, or for setting drive configuration. From the ones I remember, the $2C00 range doesn't seem to valid for anyone except perhaps for the Happy 810. Not sure about the H810, think it's a valid sector. But I wouldn't expect the program to attempt that write before making sure it's indeed a Happy. Did you receive an 'H' command, or a similar read command before? A few points are not clear from your snip. Why it tries that write twice? Why you got a checksum error on the second attempt? Why you accepted the command at all? You should NAK any attempt to read or write an invalid sector in the first place. A possible explanation is that the second time the software is switching to a high SIO speed. That could explain the checksum error. And if you didn't NAK the first time but insted you replied with Error at the end, this could be expected.

SIO is a one-to-many bus. There is a master, the computer; and there are slaves, the peripherals. It is like the army (or at the school, if you want). You are supposed to talk only when you have been told so. Otherwise remain absolutely silent. Ignore everything unless the device id is same as yours and the checksum is ok.

Hmm, then it looks like you did something wrong. No, it is normal for a drive to reply with a long timeout. This timeout is (normally) used only for the format command, which does take a while. And the timeout is only for the Complete sequence, not for the Ack/Nak one. SIO has a fixed short timeout for the latter.

Ignore then completely, all Atari peripherals do. There is nothing you can do to make the boot faster. That's the reason that XL-XE take longer to boot than older ones.

Mark, I checked your list, and I must say something. You certainly can make some good money for this on Ebay (or even here). You have quite some interesting stuff that is currently considered hot.

Even when the software never calls the OS it is still usually better to use the $3F8 method. The software might check OS Ram variables that would be different if Basic is enabled or not. I'm not saying it is the case with AR. As a matter of fact, if the original version pokes to $D301 itself, then more than likely you can do that as well. Was more a generic comment than specific to this. There is another thing I wanted to comment earlier, but I forgot, sorry. So probably now it's too late, but might be relevant for new conversion. IMHO is much better to do the conversions from the original an not from cracks. Yes, it is more work. But you avoid the risk of inheriting mistakes in the previous crack. Furthermore, sometimes cracks were done from beta releases. You can still compare the crack with the original for getting some ideas.

It is usually better to change $3F8 and force a reset (OS will disable BASIC) than disabling Basic by yourself. Long time since I messed with that, and then don't remember all the details. But the idea is to let the OS accomodate for the change.

I'm not an Amiga expert, but I don't think you can easily compare both cases. The A1200 was much more popular than the TT or Falcon. Then it would be reasonable to except much more games specific for the A1200 than Falcon games. Also, the software production ended later for the Amiga than for the ST. So in the latest years, when the expanded models were more common, and the Amiga software market was still active, very few games were released at all for the ST/Falcon. As Gunstar said, allmost all games run both in ST and STE machines. There are very few cases of STe only games, and there are some games that are ST only and don't run in the STe. You can never get a single computer that will run all games anyway. Even if you have an ST, some games might not run depending on the specific TOS version you have. Some games don't run if you have 4Mb RAM. A couple of games don't run if you have more than 512K! (yeah, as strange as it sound).

I see. Interesting. Is this an exception or it is the same with most US Gold releases?

I had some experience with NTSC vs. PAL equipment at that time, and I think you are exaggerating a bit. It wasn’t THAT difficult or expensive. You certainly didn’t need to get a power converter because you could use a local PSU (that is, you can perfectly use a 110v PSU with a Pal Euro computer). I do agree that it is not very likely that PP used a PAL machine, and even less likely that they used such one at the Datasoft offices. There is another possibility. I understand all the timing tests mentioned here are from a crack, aren’t they? Might be the timing in the euro release was adapted for PAL, and may be the crack is based on the euro release.

PASTI Atari ST Imaging and Preservation Tools Pasti is a package of software tools for imaging and preservation of Atari ST software. The two major components are the imaging tools and the emulation helper tools. SOFTWARE PRESERVATION Our main goal is the preservation of Atari software in its original unmodified form. Original software is normally stored on diskettes with custom format or copy protection. Standard tools cannot back up or image them. But floppy disk recording have a limited life time. It won't take too long until all original Atari disks will be damaged and lost. Pasti ST is an imaging tool that produces disk file images of any ST disk. It runs on any ST computer, with the only requirement of one double-sided drive. Pasti ST needs a standard 8Mhz ST CPU. It doesn’t run on TT or Falcon computers. Pasti images can be used on ST emulators using the emulator helper tool, Pasti.Dll. The DLL is currently supported by latest versions of Saint and Steem. The emulator helper tool was released some time ago. Both tools are available at our web site: http://pasti.fxatari.com Note that both tools are yet in the beta phase.

Well, I guess you cannot never be 100% sure. But those people, Andre & Deathtrappomegranate, are among the most expert ones on the issue that you can find.

This is typical of an analog copier. It can copy very advanced protections but it can’t copy some simpler ones. In some cases it won’t be able to copy disks that a software copier will easily handle. Note that some copy might seem to work, but will fail at later stages. But again, the important point about analog copiers is not what can copy and what it cannot. It’s about the reliability of the copies it makes. I’m not sure about Ghost and Goblins. If you send me a Pasti image of your disk I might be able to offer some hints.

I don’t think it is nearly true that the Omnimon was 99% of the times used for cracking purposes. I had (and still have) an Omnimon but very rarely used it for cracking. I used it mostly for my own development. And I don’t think I was an exception. Other people also used it for the “Fast Chip”, for a built-in translator, etc. I don’t think it was designed as a cracking tool in the first place. And seems that the Atari community agreed with that and didn’t see the Omnimon mainly as a cracking tool. A proof (sort of) of this is the amount of positive reviews it received at the semi-official Atari press, like Antic or Analog. Contrast this with the Happy, which was seen as a piracy tool. The Happy was almost “banned” from those magazines. Many times they praised, for example, the U.S. Doubler as one of the most powerful add-ons. But they never had the same attitude for the Happy. Of course that if you stop a commercial game with the Omnimon, then you probably want to do some hacking. This was not the point. In second place, I was not denying PP any rights, of course he had. I was arguing about the attitude being professional or not. If you want to see what is the modern view of copy protections attitude, then check the web sites of the companies that provide those services. Of course that floppy copy protection is almost dead today, but there are many other forms still very popular. Would you consider professional if Win-XP would install a worm when the activation period expired? It is true that it took some time until the industry matured about copy protections. But even at that time, that type of protection was rarely implemented because most companies already understood these issues long ago. I agree that refusing to run under Omnimon is valid and correct. But you could add a banner when detecting it (such as, INCOMPATIBLE ROM). And if you are afraid that this will make cracking easier (it doesn’t have to be), then have dual detection routines. One that explicitly stops with the banner, plus another hidden one as the “worm”. True, but this has nothing to do with this. It was/is difficult to crack because the protection is good and it was integrated with the main software. Not just an external protected loader. Also because the game is complex. It is always much more difficult to hack those types of games than a simpler arcade one that usually loads only once. Lastly, the Happy couldn’t copy the disk. So the crackers need to have an original, or crack from a non-working copy, which is also more difficult. There are many copy-protected games that they explicitly stop when the protection check fails (some even say “Pirated Copy”, other use a more polite phrase). If you think this make it easy to crack them, you are wrong.

Please forgive me all the Philip Price fans out there. But this is, IMHO, a very unprofessional attitude. You don't want the user to run the game with Omnimon, fair enough. But give him a warning (as ECA games do). Silently and slowly failing doesn't seem to be correct. Not every user running Omnimon wants to hack the program.

No device (that you can buy) can copy all ST disks. The Discovery Cartridge is the best device. Second best is the Catweasel. The Blitz, or any other analog copier, is not really recommended for copying any disk. Not even simple not copy protected disks. It is not about what can copy, but about how it copy. Or more precisely, how reliable are copies made with an analog copier, as discussed previously on this thread.

....hmmm, that sounds interesting. What are these exactly ?? Sorry, my mistake, I mixed up programs. Just double checked and there are no supertracks in The City. It still has many weak sectors plus some other minor protections. Weak sector is a sector that returns different data each time you read it. Supertrack is a track with much more sectors than the theoreticall maximum (20). Typically, 24, 25 or more (I've seen up to 40, IIRC). Sometimes the same term is used for a specific variation of these tracks, such as the ones present in later ECA titles (Archon II, Super Boulder Dash, etc). Note that there is no official terminology here. So many different terms are used for the same protection. For example weak sectors are sometimes called, fuzzy, phantom, wondering, etc.

Both AR programs are heavily copy protected, specially The City. The protection is, of course, not just some sectors that are not formatted. If that were the case then you could easily copy them with the Happy and other similar devices. But you can't. The Dungeon copy-protection is somewhat simpler than the City. IIRC it's just one weak sector. The City combines weak sectors with supertracks. It is correct that only the first side (in both the City and the Dungeon) is copy protected.

There are several utilities for creating ST/MSA disks under DOS or Windows. The most popular is probably Makedisk. Makedisk works great under plain DOS. If you have Win Me or laters systems, then it might be difficult to boot to DOS. You can either create a small bootable DOS (or Win 98) partition. Or just a FAT non-bootable partition and boot from floppies. If you still have your ST computer with a hard disk or enough RAM for a big ramdisk, then you can create the image on the ST. Then you transfer the file to the PC.

Hi Curt, Thanks for the reply (and sorry for the misspell above I’m not familiar with that emulator. But I’m not sure that would be the best solution. There are several possibilities depending on the hardware and software you have, and depending on exactly what is the problem. I understand that the problem is the AHDI extended partitions that you can’t access with DOS/Windows. Using Windows. You can backup the raw full disk to a file. The raw device will copy every sector of the disk, disregarding partitions. Once you have the file it is much easier to manipulate the partitions. There are several programs that can physically backup a raw full disk. I backed up my ST hard disk some time ago using my own software, it is trivial to do. I can provide both executables and source. You’ll need to make minor changes because it was hardwired for my setup. There is no user interface (otherwise it wouldn’t be trivial). It is even easier with Linux. The built-in utilities can dump the physical disk to a file. Furthermore, I understand that there are drivers for accessing AHDI partitions under Linux. Then you will be able to do a standard backup. If the problem is something else, please let us know.

Karl (or Kurt), an answer to the previous post will be appreciated . Thanks

There are two different issues. One is to copy a tape file (or program) to disk. Another one is to be able to run it from disk. As said, DOS copy usually can’t be used to copy from tape. It will fail because most tape programs and files were written with short IRGs. You can read more about the two type of IRGs at the Wav2Cas home page. So you need a special copy program, and there are several available. Once you have the program on file, it is yet not trivial to run it unless it’s a basic program. Again, there are programs that will let you run tape programs from a disk file. This usually works fine for single stage boot tapes. Multi-stages programs are much more complicated to handle. Lastly, there are tapes recorded with a custom format. Usually done for protection purposes. You normally can’t “read” those tapes without special tools. If you are used to load tapes you can easily distinguish the particular sound of those special formats.

DOS copy won't work for BASIC programs saved using CSAVE, neither for binary files that were written using the short IRG (as CSAVE does). Might be there is a "smarter" DOS that will open the "C:" device in short-fast mode. Then it will work as long as can read the whole file in a single operation. Otherwise a special program is needed.