(re: re: Ken: your personal collection of Sierra games)
> I’m wondering just how the program works, and then will
> it read the image afterwards?
The program stores a very accurate representation of all the “pulses” for each track of a floppy disk. This is (nearly) the lowest level of representation possible (we are talking about a far lower level than sector data, not to mention files!), so any kind of protection or strange layout can be imaged properly, and automatically.
The program requires some hardware:
– a “good” motherboard, in this case not meaning new or fast. It seems Pentium and older AMD motherboards are the best in this case.
– a fast parallel port card. A dedicated PCI-based parallel port card is best.
– a simple 2-wire cable that connects to the floppy cable on one end, and to the parallel port on the other.
The software is not able to write images back to disk (mainly because, generally speaking, this is technically not possible), so the images must be used with emulators. The first emulator to support these images is the Amiga emulator WinUAE (www.winuae.net). Other emulators should follow (probably Atari ST first).
Anyway, I think the most important now is to backup the disks before they get corrupted. Emulators can be developed/enhanced later.
> at least many people here have original disks for the
> PC-era of Sierra’s games.
In fact, I have quite a few myself as well 😉
> Perhaps if you were to give more information about the
> program and ideas about how such an archive could be
> created, how it would be organized, etc.
I would think that it is better to start with Ken’s collection, and create a list of what’s missing, posted on this site. Fans could then make images of the missing games. I’m ready to offer registered versions to anyone having missing games, as well as give any advice to help setup a working configuration for the imaging process.
I’d like to see all Sierra games imaged, including any version for any machine in any language (I think LSL3 was the first multi-language Sierra game, at least in Europe).
The box, manuals, etc. should also be properly scanned (I’d say in 600 dpi quality) and the scans archived along with the disk images.
Vincent.