if you want to read a RAW TRACK information, and syncronizes also can be done in MSX....

the trik consist in wiring the line HOLE DETECTED of the FDD connector, and to put it in printer port Busy signal , that is the only input bit that has the printer port

then to write the soft

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I've got one silly question tho... What happens after the dumps are made and analyzed? Do they just sit there on a shelf? Who's in charge of making sure these titles aren't "lost forever" and in which way are they stored?

Sure no problem.

Basically we are the people that make sure they are never lost once preserved. After the dumps are analysed and the IPF files are created, several things happen.

1) They are send to everybody who dumped & submitted that game - this is the reason you can find about 2/3 to 3/4 of all the games so far preserved on the net. Having them "go public" gives them some protection, but it can never be called reliable.

2) They are submitted to archival storage. This basically consists of two sites in the UK, one in Hungary, one in Germany and *enterprise-grade* backup facilities in the US.

3) The games are now termed as "preserved".

If we do something, we don't do it lightly.

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if you want to read a RAW TRACK information, and syncronizes also can be done in MSX.... the trik consist in wiring the line HOLE DETECTED of the FDD connector, and to put it in printer port Busy signal , that is the only input bit that has the printer port then to write the soft

I not totally sure what you mean here. Do you mean you can read the flux transitions that way?

There is some relatively powerful hardware requirements to get the data at the accuracy needed for authenticity (basically so we can ensure that a disk was not modified after the original mastering). We currently need at least a 32-bit 14Mhz 68020 powered Amiga (i.e. not a plain A500) to do the work required, so unfortunately, I would not have thought we could use the MSX itself. If we can't check authenticity, then I would argue that what you would be doing is not preservation.

But hopefully we can use some other hardware in the future, so those that would rather buy/build a dedicated device than buy an Amiga. Such a device is likely to be more expensive than an Amiga, but I can understand why people would want to do it that anyway.

The good news is that we are going to be looking into a certain Japanese 8-bit micro in the not-too-distant future, which I believe has a similar FDC as the MSX...

There are at least three different types of FDC used in MSX... of which two are almost the same.

AFAIK not even Formula, the best MSX copy program, can copy every protection that was made on MSX disks.
Of course I do not know if this is a READ limitation or a WRITE limitation. :/

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There are at least three different types of FDC used in MSX... of which two are almost the same.

It's more like 10...

IMHO the CAPS projects seems a bit to much. I'm satisfied with the DSK format and the funet ftp archive, for disks with an alien format there should be another disk format.

There is a interesting disk format called DMK used in the TRS-80 emulators. It is suitable for floppy disks formatted with the Western Digital FDC.

Technical info - DMK type virtual disks
http://discover-net.net/~dmkeil/trs80/trstech.htm

Common File Formats for Emulated TRS-80 Floppy Disks
http://www.tim-mann.org/trs80/dskspec.html

Tim Mann has also developed software for reading and writing disks using the Catweasel floppy controller.
http://www.tim-mann.org/catweasel.html

Individual Computers - Catweasel
http://www.jschoenfeld.com/

What do you mean by "a bit too much" ?

At least with the WD2793 FDC (found in Philips and Sony MSX2 systems, among others) it is impossible to read or write all protections imaginable.

The read track command decodes the data, which leaves out special things such as sector start marks. You cannot see the difference between an actual sector start and data which looks like a sector start. You could try loading the sector and see if it matches the data from the track read, that would probably work in many cases, but it is not guaranteed to work on every disk imaginable.

The write track command has even more restrictions. Some values you write are not literally written to the disk, but are interpreted by the FDC as commands. For example "start sector" or "insert CRC". So you can never write these values as data. If the bytes are inside sectors, you could do a sector write afterwards to write them. But if the bytes are inbetween sectors, there is no way to write them.

Although it isn't possible to read/write every imaginable copy protection, many existing protections can be handled. Compared to Amiga, MSX copy protections are much simpler. Because the FDC doesn't allow low-level access, checking low-level protections is hard as well. And most Japanese and European games do not use the FDC directly, only the disk ROM, because they would have to run on different machines with different FDCs. I heard that Brazilian games often access the FDC directly though, because the machines sold in Brazil all had the same FDC at the same ports.

Thanks for the info.

This is actually the same reason why we wouldn't try to read Atari ST or PC disks in their host machine - because we can't get the data we want. Our tech works with the low-level signal information, and we can't get that though most types of FDC. So the end result is that we are probably going to need some kind of special hardware to read MSX disks.

I've never heard about an MSX disk that couldn't be copied on an Amiga, so probably the Amiga's ability to do low-level disk access is good enough.

Fiath: MSX and PC disks are identical with two exeptions... MSX can't read 1.44MB disks and M$ products seems to ignore "number of heads" information on sector 0, so that there are difficulties to read 360KB disks. Amiga and Mac PC-disk drivers seems to work well also with these disks. If you use DD-disks, you will have no problem transfering files between systems. (File system on MSX and PC is FAT12)

I remember, that long ago I used Copy-X (I'm not 100% sure about the name) on A500 and I didn't have any problems backuping my original MSX software.

However, if you format a (DD) Disk on a PC, no matter what OS-version you have (don't know about Linux, tho), it won't be bootable by MSX although it is readable by MSX. Probably has something to do with the bootsector.

NYYRIKKI: Thanks for that. It does seem that because of the diveristy of FDC's used in the MSX, that copy protection would have been quite limited in what it could take advantage of.

About file systems, just so you know, the filing system on a disk is actually pretty irrelevent to our work, since we work with disk formats, and are not really concerned about what goes on at a higher level. If the low level is handled properly, and an emulator is accuate enough, there shouldn't be a problem.

I think ultimately the MSX work is likely to take advantage of the work we wil be doing for the PC/ST/Amstrad CPC/etc. systems that all seem to mainly share a common format.

We're a bit busy at the moment, but hopefully we can get on this at some point in the not-too-distant future.

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I've never heard about an MSX disk that couldn't be copied on an Amiga, so probably the Amiga's ability to do low-level disk access is good enough.

Yes, even the infamous Xak 2 copy protection could be copied by an Amiga!

What about that dutch database program (can't remember the name right now), that had screwed up sector numbering as protection? Could an Amiga read that?

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However, if you format a (DD) Disk on a PC, no matter what OS-version you have (don't know about Linux, tho), it won't be bootable by MSX although it is readable by MSX. Probably has something to do with the bootsector.

Duh, that's completely the fault of the bootsector. MSX-DOS2's FIXDISK will solve this, as will manually writing an MSX bootsector to the disk with a disk editor like DiskView.

I think you mean Dick van Vlodrop's FlexBase. Amiga could copy that, tho.