Cracked/trained Vs. Original Disk Images


starpause

Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2005
Messages
407
Age
43
Location
minneapolis
Website
mp3death.us
as everyone here and on the atari-forum know by now, i'm hot to get leander on my gp32 in CaSTaway :rolleyes:

i've tried every cracked/trained disk image listed in the atari st disk detective. they all load the group menus fine and the psygnosis splash comes up, but each and every crack dies after a few garbled notes of music play, leaving a blank screen. :(

the very good CaSTaway documentation mentions that original disks have a better chance of working than their cracked counterparts, but i wonder if each and every cracked version dies at the same place, if maybe there is a game incompatability. leander wasn't copy protected in it's original forum so maybe very little went into the crack ... i've never done that sort of work myself to know the details ... i also realize it's feasible one group ripped a disk image and others stole/repacked it.

my question, in the end, is if i should hunt down the original disks before bothering skeezix with an incompatability issue.

last: does anyone know who was running, or what happened, to the CaSTaway/GP compatability list???

thanks for reading :)
 
it's hard with floppy disk based stuff such as the amiga and the st, because there's so much stuff floating about. it's also possible you got some bad images.

some cracked disks are bound to have loader errors on emulators because of the packers they used on the st stuff, a LOT of the stoff the crackers used pushed the filesystem to the limit, and some of the compression programs that were used were not coded very well :)

the best way is to stdisk the images, and test em on the real hardware. if they work, then it's an emulator bug, if they don't it's bad images.

if you want stdisk i'll get you a link, it takes about 3 mins to format and do the image to a floppy.. and all on pc :) shame nobody managed to make this sort of thing for the amiga :(
 
hmm, thanks for mentioning stdisk, unfortunatly i do not have any hardware to try the disk images!

however, i have loaded the images up in an emulator on PC (STeem) and they booted up/loaded fine ... i was in the game quick!

is this any indicator of the disk image validity? i suppose each emulator is different so if the crackers used some trick not supported by one emulator, the disk images may just as well not work on another emulator ...
 
CaSTaway isn't a perfect emulation either of course.. its much faster than most ST emus though, and has low requirements.. which is what makes it ideal for ports to most smaller platforms. Its certainly not half as robust as STeem or SainT or the like, but what can you do :) I've talked briefly to some of those guys in hopes of porting their works, but no go as yet..

jeff
 
Iorgy77, actually that was a help ... i now have leander on my GP32! it's not as good as the amiga version (your armor doesn't change color to indicate your health :rolleyes: ) and there is some WEIRD graphical business at the bottom of the screen, but it's definitly playable in DRMD!!!

jeff, so it's nothing easy to fix a compatability issue because CaSTaway/GP is a port of an already existing emulator? another board member who has a cover-disk demo of leander said he'd get that to me sooner or later so i can try it out in CaSTaway/GP ... and so the quest continues B)
 
Back
Top