Hi everyone,

Last week, I blew the dust of my NMS8280 and decided to hook it up to my TV set again to show my girlfriend what computer I owned when I was about 10 years old.

I still own quite some floppy disks from that time, and thankfully I bought the last issue of MCCM magazine in 1997 with the enclosed CD-ROM containing hundreds of disk image files.

However, much to my regret, I cannot get the disk image of Breaker to work on the MSX. When the game loads, it displays the startup image. After that, the screen blanks and the drive stops spinning. Then everything ends. Other disk images I tried from the CD worked fine.

As Breaker was my favourite game on the MSX, I am now looking for someone who can point me at (or send me) a working version. As the game was on the MCCM-CD for controlled release to MSX-fans, I assume there is no problem in sharing it by other means as well (some 18 years after its release!).

Now that we are on the subject: Can you guys point me (being "new" to the new MSX scene) at some locations where other games from "my time" which have been publicly released now can be obtained?

Thanks,

Jorg

Jorg, like you said: the MCCM-CD was a controlled release, which is why all those companies granted their permission to publish their games on this CD-ROM. All games on it are, however, still copyrighted. I can imagine you'd like to play many of the games of the old days, but you could try to find them legally on ebay/our trading section or look for them 'by other means' . As you can read in the MRC forum policy... this is not the place for these kinds of questions.

And suggestions in this thread will therefor be moderated

OK, then. Fwew! You guys are pretty strict on this.

Anyway, do you guys have any idea what could be wrong with the disk image I created from the MCCM-CD? Is it a common issue? Are special actions (ie. dedicated disk image software on the PC, or special precautions on the MSX) required to make it work? Can the 360 KB disk image be translated to a 720 KB disk image, and will it make a difference (I can imagine a PC drive can create those disks easier)?

Thanks again.

Did you use the utils on the MCCM cd to copy the diskimage to a diskette? Which OS do you use?

I noticed that the tools on the CD were pretty old (mostly DOS-based), so I searched for a Windows version. I found a program called Disk Manager 0.08 Beta by Lex Lechs. As I said, it works OK for most of the other disk images I tried from the CD.

I use Windows XP.

nothing wrong with DOS-based utils, is there? ^^;

Hmmmmm, I've heard there are some problems with Windows XP. I also should point you to this thread where I expressed my own frustrations about all this. It proved I should set the Archive bit to make the files readable

Hopefully, these tips help you out a bit.

Can winXP handle 360kb diskettes? Or even 720kb?

no problems here...
It can even format 720K disks, but no 360K... reading is no problem

Don't think XP can handle 360k images indeed. I'd say you open the disk image with a disk image reader/editor and copy them to a disk via your pc (I think even the MSX Explorer which came with the CD could do this), or use an emulator to copy it to a newly formatted 720k disk image.

And, you could try the disk image in an emulator. If it works, then you can be fairly sure nothing is wrong with it. As for a disk writing util - I like the Spanish COPIA720 program as DCOPY has given me trouble on WinXP in the past.


~Grauw

For one thing, that's because real 720KB support in XP has (officially) vanished. Reading and writing still works, but formatting a 720 KB floppy in XP requires a bit of non-standard option use, but it's still possible.

Next, XP is NT based, meaning most of the DOS programs requiring some kind of direct access to devices don't work anymore.

Finally, I agree with Grauw on the disk image reader thing. It might even be possible with some of them to directly write the image back to a floppy. Even with XP that should work with 720KB ones.

1) If someone have issues with 360kb floppy images, just use one of many disk image managers to extract the files (given the same is not protected) and copy them to a real blank 720kb floppy

2) XP does write 360kb images without issues with dcopy.exe

It's an old thread, but i have the same problem as the topicstarter... Does anyone know how to run the Breaker from the MCCM cd on a real MSX?

restore the disk image to a disk maybe?