Multi Stage Decoder Nearly Complete

12 March 2002

The new multi-stage decoder works excellently with disk formats such as the one used by Bobo where the protection consists of missing data blocks. It also works very well with some really broken disks that we have come across.

For Bobo, the previous decoder tried it’s best to assign the missing blocks - and it actually succeeded. ;) Unfortunately that meant good blocks were assigned for missing ones and in turn this caused the remaining blocks to be bad - of course - since they were already mapped. This protection could have been decoded by a game/protection specific descriptor with the old analyser. However it was decided that we would hate to write a new descriptor for each similar protection, just different missing blocks...! The new decoder just doesn’t care - it automatically detects stuff like this without any new descriptors. Some special routines are still missing though (mostly save related), but generally it works already.