Disk Imaging Made Easier

18 March 2002

The (now old) way of dumping your games for us was rather tedious. It required lengthy setup and command line usage. Instructions were provided, but it was still quite a unfriendly way to do things. However, now a “dumping disk” has been developed that is basically a load of AmigaDOS scripts that wrap around the dumping tool (which incidentally is the exactly the same as the previous version) and provide a much nicer (and easier) user experience. Now everything is done from menus - no more command line!

The new dumping disk has the following benefits:

• Nice (but slow) menu system (it is all CLI script based).
• Every aspect of dumping now automatic (system/drive tests, rom dumps, disk dumps).
• Online help for all the various features.
• Auto discovery of all floppy drives connected (and tested on drive check).
• Game naming system enforced.
• Game information entry enforced - automatic and saved with the dumped game.
• Game information “remembered” to save typing for similar games.
• Dumping with PC2Amiga (serial, laplink 4-wire and custom 8-wire) solutions.
• (or)
• Dumping to hard disk - providing you have enough RAM (checked) - this can only be done with 4-5Mb or more.
• Disk can be ejected after load as all commands/scripts run from RAM - no disk swapping on one drive systems.

Quite nicely, the compressed disk image is only 28Kb more than the previous command line only dumping disk.

We were thinking about supporting this but in the end it was dropped because:

• Workbench needs to be loaded, and that is bad for dumping for various reasons (we were not going to put a TCP/IP stack on disk - even if there was a free one).
• People with net cards will almost definitely have enough RAM to dump to HD first anyway.
• People with net cards will probably send us the images on their Amiga’s (no PC needed) anyway.

This is the fast way to dump games if you intend to send us the images on your Amiga, if is Ethernet enabled or you are just fed up with your PC being crippled (slow) with PC2Amiga (on an NT based OS anyway) and want to delegate the transfer to a time you are not using your computers.

• Menu system very slow, it is 100% AmigaDOS scripts at the moment, using standard commands - so this does not really come as a surprise.
• OS 3 only! We forgot many commands are OS3+ only so therefore it will break under OS2+. This is a top priority fix (Edit: This has now been fixed).