Backup of NDOS Amiga Games ?

[DerHeld]

Hi,

I still have some hundred good old amiga games in their boxes and want to back them up, since I do not trust the disk that old ...

but some are NDOS - can I back them up somehow
What tools do I need?

[TheMagicM]

if they are copy protected then you cannot just 'copy them'.  You'll have to get a good copy program like Synchro Express. Thats what I used but dont remember any other worthwhile copier.

[Piru]

XCopy could copy most games, I remember. Some of the copy protected games could be backed up by using nibblecopy (enabling tracks 81 and 82 in some cases).

DCopy is also said to be good.

[itix]

You use good old X-Copy of course :-)

[MickJT]

I'm sure he wanted to backup to files..

Use DMS or TransADF.

I think the command is "DMS READ FROM DF0: TO blah.dms"

[Piru]

DMS or TransADF

These don't work with copyprotected disks (ones using non-std track format).

[cgutjahr]

Go and check out the CAPS project. They are busy making backups of original Amiga games, including the copy protection. CAPS backups can not be freely distributed (yet).

There's no way to write the backup back to a disk yet, but they're working on that. in the meantime, backups created by CAPS' tools can be played with UAE.

You might want to check the Games in their "Wanted" list. If you can supply them with a Game they still need, you'll get the CAPS image in return.

[CaptainHIT]

As Piru already said, DMS, TransADF and such tools just reading the tracks in standart OS way won't be able to read those copyprotected disks. :-(
You'll probably see the protected tracks marked as bad or unreadable.
To be able to create backups of them i wouls suggest you to use WWarp (part of WHDLoad) @ http://www.whdload.de
But you need a HD to save the disk images, and they're mostly more than 1MB reaching 4MB or 5MB sometimes!
WWarp can compress them with XPK though to save diskspace. And you'll be able to write them back on standart floppy disks again with WWarp.

Or contact the CAPS Team, they'll send you a tool to make images of the disks (nearly same way WWarp does) and save them on HD, but this one won't use any compressing so be warned if you have no HD space left.

Then send those images created with CAPS tool to the CAPS Team, they will analyze them if they're really good original copies of the game or just a simple cracked version. After that's done, and if they're truly originals, they'll convert it to a usefull image format which can be used with WinUAE!!!

So that's preserved for the future. I've already participated with all my original games i've got. :-)

Btw, check their site to see if your games are already imaged (backed up) or not.

CAPS:
http://www.caps-project.org/

[CaptainHIT]

@ cgutjahr:

There is a way to write back CAPS images to disks!!!

It's a bit fiddly diddly, but it's possible, thanks to the WHDLoad team (especially Psygore, the man!) ;-)

You just have to use the cli. In the WHDLoad Dev package there is a tool called MFM2WWarp, which normally was intended to convert MFMWarp (older style of backing up games with protected tracks done by a Cracker/HD-Patcher i forgot the nick, was something like Moby or whatever). :-)

But now it also supports CAPS images since a few versions. So you convert CAPS images to WWarp images, then can write that back to normal floppy disks including the protection. ;-)

[DerHeld]

I just looked at the caps website, on the one hand interesting - I will surely help to archive games they do not have yet.

but I also want to write my backed up diskimages to a disk back again, so I can play it again - just having some data on my harddrive will not really help me, when the disk corrupts and I want to play it again on my amiga... also what do I do with the games they already have, I still want to backup my games and they will just handle the ones they do not have yet as I understand !?

[PMC]

@DerHeld,

Probably the best way to back up your old disks is using the ADF Blitzer utility.

ADF files are Amiga disk images used by WinUAE to read "virtual" Amiga disks.  Using ADF Blitzer, you can read your disks and copy them to your HDD.  You can also un-ADF them back onto standard floppies if you so wish, although be warned that you could be breaking copyright if you do so.

The advatage of ADF as a format is that you can connect your Amiga formatted HDD to a PC and read the disk via UAE.  This will enable you to run your backed up Amiga games without having to use floppies.

Do a search for ADF on the Aminet for more info.

[Piru]

@PMC

Probably the best way to back up your old disks is using the ADF Blitzer utility.

Yet again, ADF doesn't work for copy protected disks.

[Plus4]

My understanding is that this is because copy-protected disks were written by the games manufacturers who used special equipment to write some track about 15% slower than usual.  And because the Amiga has quite a good tolerance for reading but can only write at a constant speed these disks worked fine but could never be copied by any programs...

However, I'm sure somone will put me right if this is innacurate!

However, the best copier I ever used was Tetracopy - remember that one?

I'm getting an A500 soon and am keen to find a soloution if there is one - come on guys!

[fiath]

That is "correct" Plus4, also "faster". However, it didn't really work "faster" or "slower" but the written information is "more dense" or "less dense". Basically the "bit cells" are shorter or longer. This is a bit different, but the end result is more-or-less the same (just more reliable than actually changing the drive speed).

There is a reason why we have not provided a solution to write these images back to disk yet - and it is a simple one - they are copy protected!

It will take some effort to enable this, and even when we do - you are likely to have to buy/build some hardware to do it, because the Amiga itself cannot write (most of) them for obvious reasons.

We'll do it. Just when I do not know.

[lionstorm]

@ CaptainHIT :
When I read your answer I thought WOW!
then I tried and I said UH!

well it is not that easy under real amiga (maybe it is better with winuae because I heard it can use ipf instead of adf).
I tried with rtype2.ipf and get an error message on stage 2 of wwarp readme (the sync part), something about raw and at the end it tells me something about a special piece of hardware I forgot the name (made by Jim Drew).
Lio