• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Installation Issues

VirusVox

Member
Joined
May 5, 2020
Messages
45
Location
New Brunswick, Canada
Hey all! I wasn't sure if this should go in the software support section or here, so apologies if it's in the wrong spot.

Today I acquired a complete copy of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary for Tandy & IBM Compatibles; the set is on 8 730KB 3.5" disks. Installation works just fine though disk 4, but when I insert disk 5 into my 386 the drive seems to become very active, and an after about 35 seconds or so an error flashes up (it disappears quicker than I can read, but I'm pretty sure it caught the words 'Data Error'). This problem also appeared once on disk 4, but it disappeared after a second attempt. This error has persisted through 4 or 5 different installation attempts. Any ideas on what might be causing this, and how I might fix it?

I can access the disk by itself through navigating to the A: drive and using a direct command, which does correctly show me the contents of the disk.
 
If I'm able to rip the data off the disk, I assume it would be as simple as moving the data to a different disk and then just using that in the install instead of the original disk?
 
If you can image the disk, sure. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

But if you can identify which file on the disk is damaged by the bad sector, you may be able to write the image to a new disk, then "obtain" a replacement for your damaged file from the usual websites that specialize in that sort of thing.

I hope you can get it running. I remember really enjoying that game back in the day.

If you are a Trek fan and like text adventure games, Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy on Apple II is another excellent one. Just really phenomenal writing, if you can deal with parser-based games. And the manual, it's almost as much fun to read as the game itself. (Edit: Looks like there was a DOS version as well.)
 
Unfortunately the way this game does its files they're all compressed into one archive, and then the installer decompressed the files as it goes, so the disk is just one 730KB file. I'm hopeful to be able to pull that file off the disk, move it to a new one, and away we go but whether or not that'll work I have no clue.

I must admit I don't know much about Star Trek, but I remember enjoying it a lot watching it with my Mother growing up so I'll definitely check that game out, thanks for the recommendation!
 
I wish you luck getting the disk replaced. That is a fun adventure game with a good adlib sountrack
 
Unfortunately it's as expected; neither the internal drive in my 386 or the external drive in use with my laptop can actively pull the file off the disk, and I've had no luck finding a copy of the game online that's divided into all 8 floppy disks. If anyone here has working originals for the game and would be able to rip me a copy of Disk 5 I could get my installation back on track, but until then it seems I'm stuck.
 
You may have to download the pirat-- ahem, I mean, the abandonware copy, which I assume is an archive as it would be installed on the hard drive, and then recompress it across multiple floppies with PKZIP or something. I'm not sure what else to suggest.

I do so wish that GoG would provide the original floppy images of the games they sell, rather than just an "as-installed-on-hard-drive" archive. :( Perhaps if several of us were to email them with the suggestion...........

I find Zip100 drives to be an excellent solution to this problem, although they seem to be getting harder to keep working as the years pass. The parallel port one is stupidly slow, but the SCSI and IDE ones are fine (don't confuse the IDE and ATAPI drives if you want to boot from one though; you have to have the older IDE version for that). Only caveat is that the DOS drivers require at least an 80186, but dropping a V20 or V30 into the PC/XT class machine takes care of that problem. I should probably switch to CF media, but I like to be able to hear the drives running...... :p
 
If you can find a copy of Interplay's 10 Year Anthology the Star Trek game is on there as well as 9 other games. You can probably pick it up cheaply (used) and it would be on CD - no need to play around with diskettes (and the possibility they may have been written to in the past if you got them used).

Joe
 
Back
Top