New Amiga Disk Formats Supported

2006-06-26

We have been busy adding various new amiga formats to the analyser.

Recently, we have added support for:

• Another Ubi Soft variant, this time without checksums.
• Various formats used by the games: The Champ, Turn it, Vindex, Clown-O-Mania, PP Hammer, Intact, Lorna, Street Racer
• More Turtle Byte protection variations.
• Another CHW variant.
• Protection on Alien Legion.
• Partial support for Deep Core.
• Support for the Blastar mastering error.

The support for the Blastar mastering error is worth explaining.

We had a LOT of people make images of this game, and they all exhibit the same problem which is the same block with the same header being repeated twice, which is clearly unintentional and means either a problem on the master, or when reading the master. Each and every contributors disk was the same, and it was becoming rather obvious that this is simply how they were produced.

We played through the game several times, even set a breakpoint on accessing the track containing the faulty data and the game worked regardless of the error.

However, because of the mastering error, CTA recognises and reports it as such as the normal AmigaDOS script does not allow this. So we decided that we would officially support the repeated block as a Blastar-specific format by scripting that block twice, and thus replicate exactly how the bad data is on the disk, allowing replication of the bad data as is in the IPF image.

Another game sucessfully preserved!