Make DSK image from protected floppy

Champion (401)

13-03-2012, 22:03

Hello...

I'm making DSK images from my friends floppy collection, and I stumbled upon a protected floppy.
The floppy works fine (it has a game on it), but when I try to make a DSK image from it, it says that there are a lot of bad sectors. When I try to read the floppy in MSX-Basic or MSX-Dos, it says "Disk I/O error".
I can remember that there was some sort of copy protection that gave the same bad sector effect, so I tried copying the floppy onto another floppy with special MSX copy software, and that seemed to work fine. The copied floppy worked also, but I still couldn't make a DSK image of it.

Is it possible to make a DSK image from these kind of protected floppies, and does anyone know how...?
Many thanks

By Wolverine_nl

Paragon (1160)

13-03-2012, 22:49

Hi, yes it is possible, there are a few dskimages on the web who dont show all the content but do work.

By Manuel

Ascended (19469)

13-03-2012, 23:18

wolverine_nl: so, how to do it? (Otherwise the answer doesn't have that much value for SkalTura)

By RetroTechie

Paragon (1563)

14-03-2012, 03:32

I always used to crack such copy-protected disks, such that they wouldn't be 'glued' to the original disk(s) anymore. With copy-protection removed you don't have this problem. For any software I've ever owned, either:

No copy-protection & therefore easy to move onto newer media.
Sooner or later, cracked such that it can join 1.
In time, lost to bitrot.

So as usual, copy-protections are only a nuissance for legitimate owners... (and for software producers: the better the copy-protection, the higher the chance that your software will go MIA @ some point in the future)

By Wolverine_nl

Paragon (1160)

14-03-2012, 07:28

Manuel: i never crack those, not my thing, but it is possible, probably by reading raw data from sectors (a guess) and adding a sector to initialise a usable bootsector...

By SkalTura

Champion (401)

14-03-2012, 17:03

Hi, yes it is possible, there are a few dskimages on the web who dont show all the content but do work.

Do you have a link to these tools, because I tried 2 different ones, and both fail.
They do make the DSK image, but the image doesn't work properly for this protected floppy...

By MTC

Rookie (26)

10-05-2012, 22:55

The same question is bugging me for years. I have a lot of original MSX software that I would like to preserve. Of course I can hack the protection (did a lot in the old days ), etc. but I am looking for a way to store them including the CP.

There is a piece of software called 'Omniflop' which (on paper) should be able to do so, however I never could read a disk with 'bad sectors' (which is actually the easiest protection scheme). It would be nice if there was a simple utility that could read a disk and make a 1:1 image, including 'bad sectors', disks containing more than 80 tracks/9 sectors per track/tracks with non-standard sector numbers/... However i do not know if modern drives and controllers are able to transfer the extra information (synchronisation, gap, etc.). Maybe you even need specially prepared disk drives?
Would be a nice feature for the emulators... loading and creating full disk images.

By jltursan

Prophet (2619)

11-05-2012, 00:06

There's a way to get a raw MFM image of virtually any MSX disk, protected or not, using Kryoflux USB floppy controller; but without proper emulator support of the image format, these images are (at least right now) useless.

And AFAIK there's no write support for them yet

By wouter_

Hero (525)

11-05-2012, 15:28

MTC wrote:

...It would be nice if there was a simple utility that could read a disk and make a 1:1 image, including 'bad sectors', disks containing more than 80 tracks/9 sectors per track/tracks with non-standard sector numbers/...
Would be a nice feature for the emulators... loading and creating full disk images.

This is exactly what we've been working on the last couple of months in openMSX:

The next version of openMSX will have support for the DMK disk format: http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/emulation-dmk-format/. I believe this format can represent all copy protections used on MSX.

Maybe even more important than the emulator-part is the utility to dump real disks to DMK images. We're actively working on this part. So far we have a prototype tool that runs on a real NMS8280 machine (the machine must have a WD2793 disk controller). The tool was able to successfully create DMK images for games like 'Psycho World', 'Xak2', 'Akin', 'LayDock2', 'Pixess', ... When using these DMK images, the games run fine in openMSX without having to remove the copy-protection.

By jltursan

Prophet (2619)

11-05-2012, 17:59

DMK?, cool!, I've a Catweasel hanging around

By Manuel

Ascended (19469)

12-05-2012, 23:49

And I'm testing Wouter's dump program... and I'm out of inspiration.

What disks should I try next? Something challenging please! Everything I tried so far just works