The train is a' rollin' along...

19 August 2002

• Acid: Skidmarks, Super Skidmarks
• Arkanoid
• BS, Bloodhouse: On Super Stardust
• Cardiaxx
• GA, Gary Antcliffe: Scooby-Doo & Scrappy-Doo, Universe
• Flimbo’s Quest: Actually the format is named “BWB!” (The Boys Without Brains), but it seems game specific. It will be renamed if another game using it is found. Also see below.
• R-Type: support for the highscore track, the original mastered data fails the games own integrity check (just like with Turrican).
• ST-Amiga Dual Format: Support for dual-boot (Amiga/Atari) tracks as used on many dual format disks. This needs to be manually selected as it will resolve to a 100% correct AmigaDOS track - otherwise the Amiga would not be able to read it.
• Star Glider 2: Support for the dual-boot (Amiga/Atari) tracks
• Star Glider 2: Support for the Amiga track format part
• Stone Age: Support for dual-boot (Amiga/Atari) tracks
• Synergy: Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, Bonanza Bros.
• TL: By Thomas Lopatic slight variations found on Great Giana Sisters, Steigenberger Hotelmanager
• Tri-Format: Support for multi-boot (Amiga/Atari/PC). Used on some multi-format disks. Should be manually selected, like with dual format.
• TSL: Digital Illusions games, like Pinball Dreams

• AmigaDOS, st mod: Added support for Z-Out

• Bonanza Bros: It’s Synergy.
• Great Giana Sisters: Since it is actually a TL (Thomas Lopatic) variant
• Universe: It is GA (Gary Antcliffe)

This one was quite a worry, we saw exactly the same integrity errors on every version dumped. This was 8 versions in total, from all over the world including a US release (which are usually different). This led us to believe that it was not just duplication errors, but in fact a problem with the master disk.

These errors were probably not found by Psygnosis because the games crappy loader does not check the integrity information that its own disk format uses! It also does not seem to effect the game as we have heard of 3 people that have completed it, and two of those dumped their version.

Anyway, thanks to dec0de12 - a 100% verified version has at last been dumped.

This is a game that was only available in the shops for a few weeks before legal threats from Nintendo made the publishers pull it.

It is very rare, and unfortunately all copies found so far (surprisingly quite a few) have all be modified by hi-score saves. But the hunt will go on...

This is certainly worth mentioning since there is a very impressive protection on all level data except first level. It was probably done this way to slow down the people who were trying to image the whole disk for a crack. To make a crack, the game was probably played and frozen with an Action Replay (or similar device) during loading of the next levels to find out what the game does.

Anyway, there is some very nice encryption going on for most of the tracks - the key being a 32 bit value that is different for each 4 track group. For various reasons we could not play the game to the second level to find all the track key values, so we had to break the encryption manually. But after finding all the keys and knowing what to look out for, we managed to find the data on the tracks, nicely proving the method correct.

The reason we needed to do this is so we could get the integrity information, and hence prove the disks are 100% correct.

Allow less than 16 clocks to precede MFM data if clocking is used.

EDC's can now be calculated and stored in a variable without comparing it to a value read from the data stream. This allows them to be calculated by more than one area by setting its start value from a variable at subsequent calculations and storing the result in a variable as well, or comparing the result with the expected value from the data stream. This can also be used by other operations with calculated EDC‘s.

Variables are saved at the start of the decoding of a block, and restored if any errors occur during decoding or the block does not score perfectly. This prevents bad blocks modifying data that may alter the decoding behaviour of another blocks.

It is possible to use “!” (not) operator in searches, like “data value should not be 0”. The operator can be used with variables, implicit values etc., as usual. This is used in the Flimbo’s Quest format to find out the correct (and variable!) track size automatically.

Support added for a passed application parameter (i.e. activating the analyser through file-type association). No more manual file renaming.

Saved data is now named properly (for the up and coming saver).