Work-In-Progress Reports for June 2001

Enhancements: The previous read timing algorithm was only about 90-95% accurate, though this is almost certainly much better than anything ever written without hardware. Anyway today we developed an algorithm that is 100% cycle exact. Without quantization the files produced would be 7 Mb / per track big. Thankfully though, we have managed to take the requirements down to sensible levels.

Added Reading Capability to Imaging Software: The imaging software now has actual reading capability and allows us to image track data on any disk. For those disk protections that we know about, it allows us to get the data from the disk perfectly, though the current version only dumps one track at a time. (more)

Added Density Test to Imaging Software: A density test was added to the imaging software that can see how many bytes can be written onto a selected track. This is done WITHOUT using DMA, which makes it more complicated, but much more accurate. You can compare this with XCopy's "speedcheck" though we believe that XCopy does it using DMA which although good enough to show a user, it is not accurate enough for our purposes.

Imaging Technology Gets Drive Analytics: The disk imaging software has been updated with a "drive analyser", which allows inspecting the characteristics of the drive and contains important information for when a dumped disk fails to be read. (more)

Copylock Unlocked, Part 2: Produced a program that will re-master disks with Rob Northen's Copylock protection. That is, copy the disks (disk to disk) on an unmodified Amiga. All the encryptions keys have been reverse engineered. Copylock was in theory only writeable with a special FDC that supported software adjustable drive speeds (faster AND slower than original) on the very same track... (more)

Copylock Unlocked: Completely reverse engineered Rob Northen's Amiga Copylock system. This gives us greater insight into the kind of things that are needed as part of the disk imaging technology, and will allow us to image other games that use this type of disk protection. As this was one of the most popular forms of disk protection on the Amiga, it means literally hundreds of games can be already be dumped in their original form.