This is a guide for dumping disks for C.A.P.S.. It (hopefully) does not assume any prior knowledge. Please read it all before dumping anything so we get the best quality dumps possible.
As detailed in the requirements document, you need the following:
Amiga 1200 is probably most tested, but any Amiga with the above should be fine.
When dumping to HD (i.e when NOT using PC2Amiga), the more RAM you have the better, 5Mb should be sufficient in most cases but sometime you may need anything up to 12Mb in order to dump them. However, this is very rare. Probably 99.9% of Amiga disks can be dumped with 8Mb.
A mention of Aminet means the file is located at http://www.aminet.org/ in the specified directory.
If you are not sure how to write this image to a disk, below are some pointers:
You will need the following
If you need them, there are instructions in each utility mentioned above. With these tools, you need to do the following.
If you need to use an Amiga to PC transfer solution (if for example, you have a small amount of RAM, or it is just more convinient for you), this is probably the best choice. Also:
Get it here:
There is a beta version available, but we have had some problems with it and so it is not recommended.
Get that set up on the PC side (the Amiga side is done for you using the dumping disk), all the instructions to do so are supplied in the PC2Amiga archive. In the end, you will have a "server" running on your PC.
If you install the Amiga side too (to your workbench partition), you will have a "PC:" device mounted and accessible. Now you can show the contents of your PC's C drive by using:
dir PC:C
At the Amiga command line. It might be worth testing this so you know it works before you use the dumping disk (then you will know who is to blame ;).
The PC server side of PC2Amiga runs under a dos box on windows. It is a known "feature", that if you run the dos box minimised or in the background, sometimes the transfer pauses or even stops with an error coming up on the Amiga side. This you can see since the Amiga pauses dumping the disk and pops up an error dialogue. If this happens you should bring the dos box into the foreground on the PC and click “Retry” on the Amiga. The reason for this is apparently because Windows thinks the process is idle and gradually gives it less and less CPU time.
When using the parallel solution on an unexpanded A1200 you may get timeouts for no reason at all (a A1200 with an accelerator seems to make the problem go away) . Try using the PC2AMDEB.EXE version of PC2Amiga (debug version) as this is reported to get it working.
When using a serial cable, you may find that you have to use COM1 on the PC to make it work. You also need to set the PC side to 38400 bits per second. You can change this my modifying the file "DF0:storage/dosdrivers/PCS" on the dumping disk.
Opening the PC2Amiga program on Windows NT based (NT, 2K and XP) operating systems sometimes does not work (it just comes up with a blank DOS window) – in this case, you need to open another PC2Amiga session, and then close the old one. This works for us.
You may find that on Windows XP or Windows 2000 that PC2Amiga does not realise that it is capable of long filenames (and thus does not show the “MSDOS 7+ detected, using long filenames!” message). In this case, you should do the following:
You must add the following line to your virtual config.sys file (found here "%SystemRoot%\system32\CONFIG.NT"):
device %SystemRoot%\system32\setver.exe
Open a command prompt and go to where PC2Amiga is installed. Now enter the next line (which only needs to be done once):
setver.exe PC2AMIGA.EXE 7.10
The dumping disk asks for "modifiers" for each game and disk. This is basically for miscalleneous information that may help us.
If disk is known to be broken, append "_bad" where you are prompted for the disk label. If you do not know which disk is bad, the just type it into the modifiers field.
If you have more than one copy of the same game, name one as normal (i.e. nothing in the modifier field and name all subsequent ones as alternates ("altn") where n is a number from 1 (the first duplicate) to how many duplicate games you have.
Nearly all aspects of the dumping disk have “online” documentation, but some additional information follows.
If using PC2Amiga these instructions assume you have:
Otherwise, if you are dumping to hard disk, then you just need to boot up the C.A.P.S. disk to the network menu.
Whatever option you take, you will now be asked to specify where you would like the disk image to be saved. In the case of dumping to PC with PC2Amiga, it may take a few seconds for the PC drives to appear. If anything is wrong with the connection, then you will get the PC2Amiga connection error dialog. Please refer to the PC2Amiga documentation in this case, or mail us if you are not able to get any further and we will do the best we can to help.
After picking thr relevent option you will be taken to the next stage.
It is extremely important that you send us the results of your system/drive check. We need to know that your drive is in good condition and well-aligned and thus able to dump copy protected disks properly. All drives connected will be detected and tested so we can see which is the best one to use for dumping.
The dumping software “CT” has an internal catalogue of known Kickstart versions; it may be that yours is not known. We may ask you to dump it for us, purely to expand on those known. Obviously, it is your choice whether to do so or not. ;o)
When all the system checks are done, it will tell you where the file was saved so you can both look at it if you want to, and send it along to us. Only when we have approved your system should you start dumping disks – this may save headache later.
Assuming everything is okay with your system, we can continue.
You will be now taken to the preliminary information screen. If you have more that one disk drive, you will be prompted for the drive unit number to use for dumping, this will be the best drive from the tests done above. For example, ‘0’ will usually be the internal drive.
Does your drive support reading up to track 83? Again, we will have provided you with this information with the response about your system / drive tests. It is very important that you do not try to dump up to cylinder 83 on a drive that does not support reading that high because you may damage your drive. Oddly enough, some early games used to do this!
You will now be asked what dumping mode to use. Unless we have said otherwise you should pick the default "0", by typing "0" or pressing return. There are three dumping modes:
Some pieces of hardware generate spurrious interrupts that break the delicate operation needed to read everthing of the disk including copy protection. Typically, if you have this sort of hardware we will ask you to use one of the interrupt free dumping modes. Otherwise just use the default.
You will now be asked if to keep CPU caches on or not. If you are using the default interrupt driven mode, it is very important to keep CPU caches turned off! However, the interrupt free dumping modes seem to benifit from having CPU caches turned on, so if we don't say anything else, keep the caches on for mode "1" and "2".
Please first read the help for this screen, it contains some helpful info.
You will now be asked information about each game, please see “Game Images” below about this.
You will be prompted to dump as many disks as you have typed in the “number of disks” field. If you have disks missing, just pretend to dump the disk as normal but when prompted for the disk - hold down the left mouse button to skip actually dumping it. We then know then that we have a disk missing and to look for an alternate.
For each disk, you will be prompted to insert it write-protected. We are not taking any chances here - you cannot read from a write-enabled disk with the dumping tool by design. Obviously you should not have games disks that are write-enabled anyway. (Perhaps in those factory sealed games you wish you had ;) Also for this reason please try not to write enable original game disks before dumping - even if the game itself asks you to (for saves, hiscore etc) because this will mean we have to find another (factory new) copy of the game!
The dumping process can take anywhere between 2 and 10 minutes (or even more – especially using a serial link) depending on the disk content and transfer type. One of our systems does most disks in 2-4 minutes (a 68030 Amiga 1200, dumping to hard disk) but your mileage may vary.
When you have dumped all your disks (or when you run out of space ;) please compress these images with ZIP (preferable) or LHA (and only these) since most images are usually about 3Mb but become 1 to 1.5 Mb compressed. You can get images up to about 8-9Mb so don't worry, but this is quite rare (don't worry - the released files will not be this big! ;) There is a good reason for them being that big. If your curious, just ask. ;)
There is not much point distributing these dumps other than to C.A.P.S. since They have not yet been verified and converted to the public release format that our user library understands. So basically you can't use them in UAE. Unfortuately, there are technical reasons why we can't make this possible even if we wanted to.
While dumping disks, you are prompted for bits about the game to provide us with as much information as possible to both catalogue and reverse engineer the game protection (if it has any). This saves us headache later when trying to trace information about each game. You can type “help” for each bit of information to see exactly what we are looking for. This is highly recommended, as the filename is constructed from this information too.
Other than the reasons stated, we also ask for this information as we would like to know the origin of the games to help verify the games authenticity. For example, if you bought it from a shop when it was originally released, we know it is far more likely to be a good copy than if you bought it second (3rd, 4th...) hand from eBay.
For example, we have come across original disks that have been modified in various ways without their owner even knowing.
The information is logged from your responses and included in a text file (e.g. CannonFodder.txt). This should be included in the dump archive (see below).
Please place all stuff for one game in a single LHA or (preferably) ZIP file. For example, a Cannon Fodder dump would look like this:
- CannonFodder.zip | CannonFodder_Disk1.raw | CannonFodder_Disk2.raw | CannonFodder_Disk3.raw | CannonFodder.txt
To allow you to get your images to us we provide an FTP area. Please do not make it public and please do not abuse it. When your games are released, we will put them somewhere where you can download them. Other releases are probably quite available on the Internet. And if you own the game, then you are completely entitled to them.
As has been said, pre-release dumps cannot be used in emulators as they have not been analysed – see past WIPs for why this is so important.
Aside from that, please upload your dumps in the "dumps" section, in a subdirectory by your name/nick and then the date. This will help us track things in the C.A.P.S. games log (our list of what we currently have) as well as knowing which ones are new on the FTP, and generating dump lists for the website.
Example:
Obviously, we will need to send you the details for the FTP currently used when you are ready to upload. Just mail us when you are ready.
If you are stuck, just drop us a mail and we will help you out. This also helps us, as we can see where problems are being encountered and then we can update this document accordingly.
For problems or questions about this document or with the dumping disk:
For sending your “ctout.txt” and other contributions related discussion:
Thanks very much for helping to preserve the unique Amiga legacy!
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The C.A.P.S. Team
Classic Amiga Preservation Society
http://www.caps-project.org