RAMDISK

I wish it was that easy to copy japanese games. IIRC I've tried what you're thinking, copy the contents to ramdisk then to a fresh disk. Didn't work according to plan, I find out the games are unaccessible through dos.

Fastcopy doesn't work for me either, I get a bunch of errors...I believe I stated this before in another thread. Never did figure out why I can't backup anything on my MSX2+ or my PC.

If these japanese games are original ones, then it might be that they are copy-protected. Fastcopy does not support copy-protections. On the other hand, it might also be that your disks are simply becoming too old. The magnetic fields on floppy disks eventually do become weaker. I have also had problems with some disks when I wanted to copy them to diskimage files on the PC. Some floppies had simply become unreadable. I tried them on several PCs and they failed on all of them :-(

It's a good idea to archive the aging floppy disks.

David Dunfield's ImageDisk is a great tool for this purpose, because it also stores the disk format and has lot of other features. There's also a small util included for converting the disk images to a raw data format used by emulators.

ImageDisk
www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/

I archived them under linux, with the dd command, something like 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=something.dsk'. It copies the floppy at sector level from the floppy device to a file. I made a small script that runs in a loop, asking each iteration to insert the next disk and hit enter, after which it used the dd command to copy the disk. It automatically numbered the disk images with a sequence number. Was very convenient.

Yes, ImageDisk is more suitable for obscure formats in FM/MFM mode. To get the same features under GNU/Linux one would have to write a kernel driver, then there's also the Catweasel card that already has a driver and would be more suitable.

However, mostly the disk geometry is pretty standard in the MSX world.

It's in MCM 29

You can download it from here. Or download the disk that came with the magazine directly.