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Model III & Model 1 dual boot game disks

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Chromedome45

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I have access to a few of the self booting games and I usually create actual disks using Super Utility 3.2. The ones I create work fine in my Model 1 but will
not boot in a Model III. Was wondering if I should try Super Utility 4? Or any other advice as always appreciated! :confused:

BTW this is using an emulator to make them.
 
Frank,
I'm curious if they would copy correctly if you created them in a Model 4 with Super Utility.

You could always copy them with a KyroFlux or Supercard Pro. That will duplicate them for sure.

Larry
 
A disk can be made to be self booting on either the Model I or the III, IV, IVP's. The Model-I was originally single density. The double density disks' for the Model-I would have Track 0 in single density while the rest of the disk was double. The diskettes for drives 1-3 could be fully double density on the I, just the boot disk had the odd track 0.
 
So I tried to use Copycat and kept throwing a Single Density error. I have an Adpatec ISA controller in my tweener system and I know it can handle single density disks.
Also SU4 in Model 4 mode did not work either. Will keep hacking away at it.
 
Chromedome45 said:
So I tried to use Copycat and kept throwing a Single Density error. I have an Adpatec ISA controller in my tweener system and I know it can handle single density disks.
Also SU4 in Model 4 mode did not work either. Will keep hacking away at it.
Click to expand...

It bears reiterating that Model I/III dual boot disks are mixed density on track 0, with enough single-density sectors to handles the Model I booting and enough double-density sectors to handle Model III booting. Model I cannot boot double-density, and Model III cannot boot single-density. PC floppy controllers and some image formats are just simply unable to handle mixed-density on a single track. The Kryoflux and the CatWeasel, along with the Model III and Model 4 controllers, can. Now, the Gate Array Model 4's controller sometimes was a bit flaky on single-density as I recall.

Some of those dual-boot disks required special creator programs and could not be duplicated even with a Model III/4 and any normal copy utility. The creator program would format track 0 in one density with a lot of padding before the first sector, then it would reformat track 0 in the other density and issue a force interrupt command to the FDC before the formatting got to the other density's first sector. It's a pretty neat trick that it worked at all. Even with an emulator I would suspect that a PC FDC is just simply not able to do it, since the PC FDC doesn't have the ability to abort the track initialize operation (as far as I can tell) and that ability (the WD1793's Force Interrupt) is how this trick is pulled-off.

Also, as far as I know many common image formats such as IMD can only have one density set for any given track; DMK, on the other hand, can mix and match single and double-density sectors at will, even more than the real hardware can handle.
 
Yeah so I understand. So I have given up hope of this working for now.

All I really wanted was the Defense Command game from Big 5 software and I did find the standalone */CMD image file I had in my archive.

So I extracted to a 3.5 floppy on my PC and did an import of the file to my emulator on my tweener and wrote it out to disk.
 
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