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Re: Need replacement disks for Tower of Myraglen

Mitchell Spector wrote:

"Peter Watson" <paw77@N_O_hotmail_S_P_A_M.com> wrote:
A LONG time ago I used to work for an Apple dealer, and the last thing we wanted to do in those pre-hard disk days was leave original disks lying around for programs used for demo purposes. So making copies of master disks was fairly important to us. 

My notes from back then for Tower of Myraglen had the following:
"Both disks are "standard" format, although block 7 on the *startup* disk is "bad". Copy2Plus *sector* copy will handle it automatically."
I don't know whether block 7 was anything more than a simple "bad" block, but since it was a very early GS game the 3.5" copy protection mechanism may well have been fairly unsophisticated (compared to the 5.25" copy protection schemes). My memory says that the sector copy disk worked just fine. And I remember being a little surprised that a sector copy wrote(?) a "bad" block when the read failed instead of writing an empty "good" block. 


    Part of the problem is copy-protection, the other part (I'm quickly
finding) is a corrupted/damaged disk.

    I _did_ have some success with Copy II Plus 9.1, using the auto
copy parameters for the 3.5 Bitcopy option. There are three listing for
Tower of Myraglen, using them does a bitcopy and patches some
specific bytes. In one try I created a copied disk and replaced the
few data files that were corrupted using the pirated copy. It wouldn't
boot directly, but did startup from the Finder! (I saw the opening credits, and musical animated intro...ah ha!).
Unfortunately, since then each time I try to make a duplicate, the main program file ("TOWER.SYS16") comes out corrupted. I had been lucky that *one* time and it managed to read and duplicate it. Bottomline is I now know how to bypass the copy- protection and duplicate the disk but *stuck* because the disk has rotted. The solution is having someone with an original disk 
use Copy II Plus to create me an image.

    On another interesting note, there seems to be more tolerance
to the physical disk errors using my SuperDrive and Apple II 3.5
Disk Controller over the Apple 3.5 on the Smartport. It'll actually
boot up part way on the SuperDrive (it gets as far as the graphic
screen where it reports how much memory is installed, then crashes into Monitor). 

Yes, it's been my experience that 3.5" disks are more sensitive
to the alignment/adjustment of particular drives than 5.25" disks.
Before blaming the disk, try some more drives.  ;-)

Also, might try the ProSel 8 Volume Copier on the disk.  It is
much more willing to retry blocks than most copiers, and it will
report when it runs out of retries and give you the option to
keep trying or bypass it and write a block of zeroes.

(This is most useful if most of the disk is unprotected.)

-michael

New, faster SUDOKU v2.0 solver for Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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