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Trouble imaging my Back to the Future Part II floppy

Postby Kroagnon » Sun Sep 23, 2018 5:57 am

I'm trying to preserve my floppy image of this old game from 1990 and upload it here, however I'm a bit confused by something...

I'm using WinImage, and have managed to image the disk. I got a bad sector near the end, but a couple of retries seemed to get through it.

Once imaged, there are five hidden "gibberish" files on the disk, though: named "Ûm¶Ûm¶Ûm.¶Ûm", and this is also set as the disk label. With the image saved, I cannot change the label nor delete these files even if I wanted to. If I view the real floppy in explorer with hidden files turned on, those same five "gibberish" files are shown.

Since all the other files on the disk are the same as found in common "rips" of this game, these surely can't be corrupted/missing files. I am presuming they are part of some copy protection (they are *hidden* files on the real disk, and only show up if I turn hidden files on or in WinImage). The label part has me confused, though, since it shows up as the disk's label under emulation when I mount the image, but when I mount my real floppy disk, the disk is reported to have "no label".

I've tested the game to the first level (it's awful, so playing past that would be a chore!) and it seems to run properly from the disk image, which I guess backs up the strange files not being important or part of some copy protection scheme.

My real quandary is, should the image I upload retail these "errors" (including the scrambled disk label), should I reconstruct the image to "fix" this, or should I just be using something other than WinImage?

EDIT: Just noticed the disk's boot sector is labeled as "KEY DISK", which might support the copy protection theory?

However, making a "reconstructed" image - that is, making a new 720k image, copying the boot sector from the original, and then copying all the non-hidden files from the original disk to said image - creates a disk image that seems to work fine in emulation, as well as the 1:1 image I made... so it seems those strange files and the gibberish label *isn't* needed to play the game off a disk after all? I can also "copy a:\*.*" to the hard drive and play without the disk with either image!
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Re: Trouble imaging my Back to the Future Part II floppy

Postby hfric » Mon Sep 24, 2018 1:04 am

could be a CP ... that would kick in later levels ... could be
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