Picked up another Skins Game set with a 1.06 hard drive, it shows "Troon" golf courses on the title screen. This time it works and I was able to read out the drive but it gave a few sector errors. We waited too long before getting desperate on buying these all up and now we are paying the price. There's a different revision of Skins Game available for sale if anyone can pay for it.
Tat Vs. Cap was dumped a couple of days after arriving and the devs still haven't added it. Techno Drive isn't added because Guru still hasn't dumped it.
> Picked up another Skins Game set with a 1.06 hard drive, it shows "Troon" golf > courses on the title screen. This time it works and I was able to read out the drive > but it gave a few sector errors. We waited too long before getting desperate on > buying these all up and now we are paying the price. There's a different revision of > Skins Game available for sale if anyone can pay for it. > How do you read out the hard drive? Can the sector errors be fixed by tools?
Currently I read them out with winhex to an exact image file. It works correctly but doesn't seem to give multiple tries to bad sectors. Apparently there is some Linux "DD" method that can do a bunch of retries on sector errors that I just found out about. I will give it a try some time but there's no guarantee it will work any better.
> Currently I read them out with winhex to an exact image file. It works correctly but > doesn't seem to give multiple tries to bad sectors. Apparently there is some Linux > "DD" method that can do a bunch of retries on sector errors that I just found out > about. I will give it a try some time but there's no guarantee it will work any > better.
Maybe we can find someone who write the perfect tool for MAME. Thanks for the info.
> > Currently I read them out with winhex to an exact image file. It works correctly > but > > doesn't seem to give multiple tries to bad sectors. Apparently there is some Linux > > "DD" method that can do a bunch of retries on sector errors that I just found out > > about. I will give it a try some time but there's no guarantee it will work any > > better. > > Maybe we can find someone who write the perfect tool for MAME. > Thanks for the info.
using gnu ddrescue under windows: first go to http://www.cygwin.com/install.html and download cygwin's setup.exe, run it and install the base packages/etc. (more or less hit next a bunch of times and wait a while). once done, run the setup program again, hit next a bunch of times until you get to the package manager screen, and then in the search field type 'ddrescue' and click on the 'skip' section to set it to the higher of the two available version numbers. click next and it will download and install some more stuff. Now on the desktop there should be a cygwin or 'cygwin bash shell' link. right click that and choose 'run as administrator'.
Now comes the complicated part. you need to figure out what the X in //PhysicalDriveX is for the disk you want to image. In windows XP: click start, run, type 'compmgmt.msc', go to the console tree, and click "Disk Management" In windows vista/7: click start, click accessories, rightclick on command prompt and choose 'run as administrator' and at the command prompt type compmgmt.msc, and when it shows up click disk management in the dropfield at the left (under 'storage'). In either case you should be given a bunch of disks and a list below showing disk 0,1,2,3 etc depending on how many drives you have installed. The X in //PhysicaldriveX corresponds to this 'disk' number for each disk.
anyhow, back in cygwin, type: mkdir ~/whatever and then type mount -f -b //./physicaldrivex ~/whatever/ and then type ddrescue -r 2 ~/whatever ~/diskimage.bin ~/diskimage.log
ddrescue should try pretty hard to read the contents of the disk mounted to ~/whatever into that bin file. If it hits some sector errors, run the command again; it will retry any error areas twice again, and leave the rest of the file it read alone.
remember, the resulting bin (and log, which shows the error and good areas) files live in the c:\cygwin\home\windows_username\ directory since you'll want to copy it out later.
LN
"When life gives you zombies... *CHA-CHIK!* ...you make zombie-ade!"
> Currently I read them out with winhex to an exact image file. It works correctly but > doesn't seem to give multiple tries to bad sectors. Apparently there is some Linux > "DD" method that can do a bunch of retries on sector errors that I just found out > about. I will give it a try some time but there's no guarantee it will work any > better.
Guru's drive is also 1.06 (he dug it up and sent me a picture of the sticker) so between the two we should be OK without needing re-reads.
There are a couple of others that gave sector errors that I would like to try the DD crap on at some point just to see if it does anything different. But I'll skip on Skins.
I think that's my favorite scene where he calls the strikes early. Perfect comedy timing. Right after it leaves the pitcher's hands - Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
They, and one other have been cool to talk with at conventions and might be willing to help with an old game rescue. I know, it's a long shot but you never know. So very many still know nothing about what we are doing here.
In general I'll be avoiding pay services by any means necessary, especially ones that are so expensive that they don't put prices on their site, and I'm not going to email them asking for handouts, but if you want to and set something up I'll mail drives out.
Honestly, I think folks should just let chdman do it's thing. Set it up in a bare bones system and forget about it.
Unless someone has stated officially that it may be flaky and I missed it?
I have only used it and have read and written hd's probably close to 50 times and have never had an experience that made me look elsewhere.
I won't be using the newer chdmans though, I'll stick with the last version that doesn't require flags(0.145?) and use the latest chdman to update the chd.
If that guy doing the chdman gui added a read/write HD function then I would probably use the latest.
Well of course Smit. How much does it cost? $800 to $3000. 3k is for an ssd. Thankfully, we'll never have to deal with one of those. No one is going to pay or kickstart for that.
If you have a drive right now with something so great, it's worthy of a handout rescue, I'll start compiling the letter.
No, no code deserves to die, even a revision. Sometimes, you have to choose that which lives another day.
I don't know how much it costs. If it costs anything then it's too much at this point. I haven't even tried the Linux crap yet. I think I can find another drive of everything I have that has given errors if it ends up being necessary with the exception of Hairstyles Illusions. If you want to write a letter about that it would probably end up being comical. There are games for sale in Japan from the 80s for several thousand dollars each with a much more desperate situation so I'd suggest routing efforts there. I got a message from someone within like 1 day of posting this who has this 1.06 version as well as Skins Tournament and Target Terror and others he is sending me so, we'll get through the Midway problems, it's just going to take some time (and money).
> I know this is gonna sound weird, but it works a lot more than you'd think. > > double ziplock bag the drive, stick it in the freezer for about half an hour so it > gets chilled, then try again. > > Cold drives are happy drives
I tried this with balrog on the hairstyles drive that smitt lent me. It didn't help, the drive just continuously fails its post test (doesn't even id itself/instantiate to the computer) with lots of clunking. Its gonna need data recovery to get anything off of it afaict. We even tried with the drive cable running into the freezer and it didn't help.
LN
"When life gives you zombies... *CHA-CHIK!* ...you make zombie-ade!"
> > I know this is gonna sound weird, but it works a lot more than you'd think. > > > > double ziplock bag the drive, stick it in the freezer for about half an hour so it > > gets chilled, then try again. > > > > Cold drives are happy drives > > I tried this with balrog on the hairstyles drive that smitt lent me. It didn't help, > the drive just continuously fails its post test (doesn't even id itself/instantiate > to the computer) with lots of clunking. Its gonna need data recovery to get anything > off of it afaict. We even tried with the drive cable running into the freezer and it > didn't help. >
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