Electron disk recovery?

[GuitarPhil]

I'll be dropping the disk off with Daniel at the weekend so fingers crossed!

Ian it seems I can't reply to your PM as I don't have enough posts on here

If you PM lurkio he can give you my email address. I don't like publishing it on forums!

Phil.

[1024MAK]

If you ask the admin team, they can enable PM's.

Mark

[GuitarPhil]

If you ask the admin team, they can enable PM's.

Mark

It seems they have done so now without me asking

Phil.

[danielj]

Eyes everywhere

d.

[danielj]

Disks received! Thanks Ian - will have a look at them later!

d.

[lurkio]

Good luck!

[danielj]

First pass I've managed to get everything but whatever's on track 79. I'm just blatting that again with 40 retries on it. The disk isn't in great nick (bit of mould, fluxes rather wobbly!), but this is quite hopeful!

[danielj]

And another read with a good track 79. Time for a bit of splicing. Back later.

d.

[danielj]

Tada!

[CMcDougall]

29 files per the cat, so can it goto DFS so folk can use it....

[tomlinson]

Amazing! Well done!

I'll get the rom up as soon as I can!

[lurkio]

Brilliant work, Daniel! Was it a tricky disc to recover the data from?

[danielj]

No, not too bad. The software did the donkey work on his one and I used a couple of different floppy drives. I don't think you could have go it off with a computer though - some of the tracks took several goes, and I did need to give the disk a good clean with IPA beforehand. The kryoflux software is more forgiving than hardware when it comes to attempting to interpret whatever comes in - even the bad read of the track was fine apart from about 6 bytes in one of the sectors which turned out to be blank anyway!

d.

[lurkio]

Interesting! Never used or even seen a Kryoflux myself. Nice work!

Here are the contents of the ADFS disc image transferred to a DFS .SSD disc image:

• ALPS3.2.ssd.zip

  Electron ALPS utils disc image (contents transferred from ADFS image above)

  (30.61 KiB) Downloaded 46 times

(I've called it version 3.2 because that's what the System Notes say -- although the title screen says "1.2".)

You really need the ROM to do anything useful with it though...

[danielj]

Do we have the "Mega" file disk?

d.

[lurkio]

Do we have the "Mega" file disk?

Yes! At least, I think so. I just used the Utils menu and chose to generate the "example files" onto a blank .SSD in Drive 1 in BeebEm:

• ALPS3.2 Electron MEGA disc.ssd.zip

  MEGA disc for Electron ALPS

  (12.96 KiB) Downloaded 45 times

I believe the generated files need the ROM to load and run them. But perhaps you can also use the instructions that Phil uploaded earlier to generate standalone runnable games from them..?



EDIT: By using the "Create a game file" utils menu option and entering the details for the adventure named TINY on the "MEGA" games disc attached to this post, above, and after fiddling about a bit, I was able to generate a standalone game. See the attached disc image:

• TINY.ssd.zip

  TINY standalone adventure game program

  (6.04 KiB) Downloaded 44 times

Though the utils disc was originally meant to be used with an Electron with ADFS, I was doing all this on DFS in Model B mode (or B Plus mode, I forget which) in BeebEm, which may be why there were some oddities on the TINY disc I generated: the loader program TINYG appeared twice -- the two files were on different sectors of the disc, but both had the same filename! I renamed one of them to TINYG2 by manually editing the disc catalogue. Also, the loader program TINYG is corrupted at the end, though it still seems to work.

[JonC]

Really looking forward to this, 20 odd years since I had a play with ALPS on my Elk!

[tomlinson]

It will be Saturday before I can upload the Rom, sorry but promise it is coming!

Daniel is there any chance you could write me a new ADFS disk on the other one I gave you? (I presume I can't do this with UPURS?) I'll let you know the next time I'm passing.

Looking forward attempting to write an adventure with Electron ALPS. Perhaps the extension and extras features will be up and running soon too!

[lurkio]

The Electron ALPS Extension Pack and Extras Disk will be a little while coming, I'm afraid. They'll have to wait till I get back to where my Acorn hardware is. (That's the address Phil's sent the discs to.) But I'll upload them ASAP.

(I'm not sure how UPURS works, but if it's DFS only, you could try transferring the files from the .SSD disc image I uploaded, above, to a DFS disc on your Elk/Beeb, if you have the right kit. The files on that .SSD are just the same files that were on the ADFS disc that Daniel recovered with the Kryoflux.)

[GuitarPhil]

That's great work Daniel, Ian and lurkio.

I'm looking forward to some new adventures now

Phil.

[danielj]

Daniel is there any chance you could write me a new ADFS disk on the other one I gave you? (I presume I can't do this with UPURS?) I'll let you know the next time I'm passing.

I'll see what I can do!

d.

[MartinB]

I'm not sure how UPURS works, but if it's DFS only, you could try transferring the files from the .SSD disc image I uploaded, above, to a DFS disc on your Elk/Beeb, if you have the right kit.

UPURS can do a myriad of things as long as we're talking DFS and transferring a PC-based ssd image to a physical floppy is it's bread & butter functionality so that'll be an easy yes...

[lurkio]

I've grouped all the Electron ALPS uploads together in one post here:

• http://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewto ... 78#p152692

[danielj]

Excellent - I love seeing this all come together!

Just for interest, here are a few screenshots from the kryoflux dump.

First, here's what a "good" MFM track should look like - you can see the fluxes are nicely distributed at 4, 6 and 8 microseconds:

Here's a track that the software did manage to decode, but the disk isn't in a good way - this could be down to the original mastering, or just the disk itself not spinning well - but it's going to be marginal for a 1770 to decode at best:

And here's a track that really wasn't readable - you can see the "smeared" bits:

The kryoflux just saved me from getting really grump with my V9000 - I was convinced one of the drives had died until I kryofluxed a disk that I'd been trying to format with it and realised it wasn't writing track 0... Mainly because the lead from the drive 0 rw head was stuck behind the drive 1 rw head! It's a really great little tool

d.

[lurkio]

Thanks, Daniel. I don't understand any of that (for a start, why are there three separate traces on each graph?!) but it's fascinating!

[danielj]

Thanks, Daniel. I don't understand any of that (for a start, why are there three separate traces on each graph?!) but it's fascinating!

- so ADFS discs are MFM encoded - the wikipedia page gives a reasonable explanation of this, but better is the description here: http://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/FD- ... Modulation

But the upshot of this is data is encoded as flux changes (that's what each dot on that graph represents), and the time between them. For MFM (double density) the "the possible gaps between pulses are 4, 6 and 8us - hence the three lines. If you were looking at FM (single density) encoding you'd see two lines at 4 and 8us. For high density the times are halved (2, 3 and 4us). The graph is useful as you can see if the disk is in reasonable condition (as in the top image), or if it's really a bit messy (the ones from the ALPS disc).

d.

[tomlinson]

Hi all,

Just wanted to thank Daniel once again for saving the Electron ALPS disk!

I haven't forgotten about the Alps ROM... just been rather busy. Attached is (or what I hope is) an image of the ROM created using *UPXROM. Please let me know whether this is correct??? Apologies in advance if not

The ROM is v3.2 and it seems the Utility Disk software is v1.2

I've tried the extracted 'Tiny' and 'Miss1' sample game files with the Rom and they seem to work perfectly!

Unfortunately I do not have the user guide, but I presume the procedure for creating adventures is the same as the BBC version.

Out of interest I looked through the Electron User mags and it appears Elk ALPS was available from PRES for more than a year so I should imagine there are many other copies out there.

[lurkio]

I haven't forgotten about the Alps ROM... just been rather busy. Attached is (or what I hope is) an image of the ROM created using *UPXROM.

Thanks!

I've tried the extracted 'Tiny' and 'Miss1' sample game files with the Rom and they seem to work perfectly!

I concur!

• 

  Screenshot of BeebEm running Electron ALPS (v3.2)!

I've updated the main ALPS thread with the ROM image:

• viewtopic.php?f=32&t=10578&p=152692#p152692

[GuitarPhil]

Hi all,

The ROM is v3.2 and it seems the Utility Disk software is v1.2

The ROM and Disk are fully compatible, I didn't ever keep the version numbers the same. ALPS for the BBC was 2.x and ALPS for the Elk was 3.x. Utilities disks just got numbered from 1.x

Unfortunately I do not have the user guide, but I presume the procedure for creating adventures is the same as the BBC version.

Exactly the same

Update: I just found a printout of the User Guide so when I get the chance I'll scan it in and upload a pdf version.

Phil.

[danielj]

Does this mean that nothing is now missing?