Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
Games enjoy a particular virtue in that their data is digital and can be copied exactly 'till the end of time (to a point, but that's another story about nibble counts and the like). So even if you made an exact copy of the game, using the same data on the same media, has it retained its original value? Since it is indistinguishable from the original item, yes. I'm assuming you're referring only to software (the non-physical aspect of the game) here. B-) -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
C.E. Forman wrote: It is a little depressing to me personally that adventure, strategy, and wargaming genres are the only genres that seem to be collectable. I guess it's just traditional supply and demand... I dunno, I've seen quite a few early Apple II arcade games fetch huge bids. Star Blazer by Tony Suzuki topped $120 once. I should have clarified IBM PC action games. If anyone has ever heard of an older IBM PC non-adventure non-strategy game ever fetching more than $30 I would love to hear about it. -- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) World's largest electronic gaming project:http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene:http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/ -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Jim Leonard wrote: [snip] I should have clarified IBM PC action games. If anyone has ever heard of an older IBM PC non-adventure non-strategy game ever fetching more than $30 I would love to hear about it. An IBM version of Microsoft Decathlon is easily worth more than $30. Then again, you said older, not oldest. :) -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
I should have clarified IBM PC action games. If anyone has ever heard of an older IBM PC non-adventure non-strategy game ever fetching more than $30 I would love to hear about it. An IBM version of Microsoft Decathlon is easily worth more than $30. That's Microsoft's ONLY action game of the 1980s. Name at least one more ;-) Flight Simulator? (Okay, technically not pure action, but definitely non-adventure, non-strategy.) -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
C.E. Forman stated: Is it okay to rewrite a collectible disk? I personally would say yes, but the last time I was in Europe one of my German collector friends insisted no, that would devalue it in his mind. He even went so far as to say he'd prefer a non-functional but unrewritten disk to a rewrite that worked perfectly. Anybody else have feelings on this? Well, I'm one of those nasty open the shrinkwrap guys, so a rewritten disk wouldn't bother me, as long as it was the same code. Obviously you don't want a pirated version on an original disk. That means no converting booters to regular MS-DOS, too. I'm sure that's exactly what you meant, but I thought I should state the obvious. 8) -- Lee K. Seitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
Dan Chisarick wrote: - Would you fix a damaged box (say with a magic marker or even meticulous work with paper and adhesive) and regain its value? Even if the materials were from another original box? If you mean literally cutting and pasting, no. But it is very common to make a complete package with items from different incomplete packages. - For the 'still in original shrink' fans, is a perfect game that's reshrunk still as valuable? Even if it was reshrunk w/the identical wrap and identical machine? It is impossible to re-shrink a game with identical wrap and machine, so this question is moot. - If Richard Garriot had original disks, original labels, (ok, just original everything) and pieced together another dozen original Akalbeth's, are they as valuable as the first set? (Discount the fact that additional copies devalue the existing ones as there are now more of them.) No, because the item is valuable because of it's original age and publishing run. Anything he releases nowadays should be considered a reprint/repress, and treated accordingly. It may be difficult to determine which items were reprints and which weren't, but that doesn't mean the reprints should carry the same value. Value is primarily determined by how hard something is to get. Garriot's reprints would have a high value, since there would be only 12, but they shouldn't have as high a value as the original ones. - If you piece a truly rare game together from multiple copies (manual from here, lid from there, disk from somewhere else, etc.) is it as good as a complete set from the factory? (This is a tough one.) It's not tough at all -- it's indistinguishable from a complete factory set if you use materials from other factory sets. I'd say yes, it is as good. Games enjoy a particular virtue in that their data is digital and can be copied exactly 'till the end of time (to a point, but that's another story about nibble counts and the like). So even if you made an exact copy of the game, using the same data on the same media, has it retained its original value? Since it is indistinguishable from the original item, yes. My opinion: Nope, even though the disk will eventually fade into chaos. Always do your data restoration projects on copies. That way you can have your cake and eat it too. Since a rewritten disk is indistinguishable from a factory-perfect one, why do you have this opinion? Who could tell? -- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ -- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
Re: [SWCollect] Repairing floppies (long)
This is neat info. Would you mind if I quoted it somewhere on oldskool.org (giving you full attribution, of course)? Dan Chisarick wrote: Obligatory Apple plug - I've done very similar things w/Apple disks. Most copy-protected Apple disks use very basic format protection (they change the marker bytes that designate the start of a given sector). One of the more reliable strategies I've used is to nibble copy the entire disk (tools are available for this all over), normalize the nibble copy, normalize the original, and compare the raw data. For coveted titles (nearly anything made by Origin, namely Moebius) I'll do this 3x per side to insure perfect integrity. I insure all error checking is enabled when extracting data, too. By normalize I mean to read the raw data using the same code as the copy protection (requires some code analysis or analysis of the raw disk data), let it do all the fancy decoding, and write out the decoded data using normal DOS. This isn't necessary w/unprotected disks. Truely hosed data can usually be discovered by re-reading a sector using a nibble editor (something that lets you see the raw, undecoded data). If the data appears wildly random each time, chances are the track is toast. The exception for PC folks would be tracks that use weak bits, but that's for the copy protection, its not really data per se. I don't think this was ever used on an Apple. I've used layered approaches as well, reading in between the tracks (quarter or half-tracks) when nibble copying the disk, and following the above, and also modifying the disk drive speed, and following the above. For games (as opposed to personal data where only one copy may exist), I've spliced sectors and tracks from multiple copies to make one good copy (danger: it was fairly common for multiple versions of a game to exist with no indicator that this was the case, so this isn't safe). Its gratifying to find sometimes that areas that are physically damaged are unused :) I've had it happen more than once that the track that contained all the funny signatures to verify the copy protection had died, and also that games that only used say the first 16 tracks had errors on the last four (unused) tracks. Its easy to verify this on single-load games (just boot the original). I've also had it happen that the copy protection was a slightly modified DOS (most are) and the bad sector was only in the protected DOS. With a few modifications, all the data could be recovered, and use a fresh copy of a standard DOS to load. The best books to own are Beneath Apple DOS and Beneath Apple ProDOS. That and a few issues of Hardcore Computist, but those are much harder to come across. And just so we don't let history repeat itself, always backup your favorite disks to disk image files (I used Disk Factory 3 for my PC stuff, and Azimov for my Apple II/IIgs), pack them in something that can detect errors like WinZIP (or Stuffit), and make multiple backups of the archives. Now send copies of those archive disks to your friends (encrypt personal data if you're paranoid) in case something happens to your storage facility, and you should be reasonably safe for at least the next 15-20 years when its time to juggle media again :) On Dec 2, 2003, at 6:22 PM, Jim Leonard wrote: (hopefully this information will be useful to those of us who have bad diskettes in their collection and want to give a shot at repairing them) In further reply to Stuart, to recover truly broken disks (not copy-protected), it depends on how bad the damage is. Some bad disks are caused because of a power outage right when the drive was writing to the FAT (MS-DOS term, meaning table of contents of the files on the disk); there is a copy of the FAT on each (MS-DOS) disk, so you determine the good one and copy it to both locations. Not sure about other platforms, so I'll only talk about MS-DOS-formatted disks for now. Most of the time, disks don't go *physically* bad (dent in the media, puncture, etc.) but rather lose strength over time, causing some 0s and 1s in a particular sector to be misread. (The drive knows that the data is wrong because it uses CRCs (a unique number generated from data) for each sector: If the CRC recorded on disk doesn't match the CRC calculated from the data, either the CRC is wrong or the data is wrong.) Recovering lost sectors can be handled several ways, but the first thing to do is to run a program that ignores CRC errors and just dumps the data to disk. If it's text, it should be a small to medium-size corruption that should be visible and fixable by a person. If it's a program or other binary file, you need 100% correction. Norton's disktool, PCTools, and MACE Utilities used to be the only tools widely available to consumers that fixed disks. They all followed a procedure similar to this: 1. Read a track. If no errors, write that track back to disk, refreshing
