Re: Hellfire Warrior (Dunjonquest series) lost? - Found and Preserved!

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, July 26, 2012 3:52:51 PM UTC-5, Vladimir Ivanov wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jul 2012, Hot Rod wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > If you're able to produce a working .NIB image, I can probably normalize 
> 
> > it into a .dsk image.
> 
> 
> 
> NIB is easy if the final target image was done already, but I still have 
> 
> lots of work to do. Quite high on my hobby list, actually.
> 
> 
> 
> In the meantime Antoine might provide NIB of the diskette faster. In which 
> 
> case I will buy him a bottle of wine on some future occasion.

So here's an interesting story.  Vladimir indeed had a low-level image of Hellfire Warrior.  I spent some more time with my failed copy, and after several notes back and forth, we determined that his version was indeed a DOS 3.3, 16-sector variety, whereas mine had been a DOS 3.2, 13-sector version.  Further, there were 146 failed sectors on my copy, and not enough good ones remaining to save it.

But, Vladimir pulled out all the stops and manually stitched together a working .nib image from his low-level disk image.  And I do mean manually stitched together, track by track until it worked.

Here's where it gets more interesting - as he's doing this, he noticed that the first few tracks and sectors contained data that seemed to match my description of the Rings of Saturn crack (from another thread). He sent me a sample .nib image that had a partial reconstruction to look at.  Yep.  Same type of boot, same DOS, etc.  So now we knew that if he could complete the .nib construction, due to recently having completed Rings of Saturn, this one could easily be normalized too.

So once he completed creating a working .nib image, I took that and used Advanced Demuffin to grab and convert the data from tracks $03-$22.  This one was a bit more involved, only due to there being more protected tracks and sectors (three 'sets'), each requiring a separate modified data marker.

Once demuffined though, a fast DOS was able to be placed on tracks $00-$02 and it was good to go. And this time all done via emulators; I used a real Apple II for Rings of Saturn.

The cool thing though is that there's now a working .nib image in addition to the 'cracked' .dsk image, so if anyone wanted to try their hand at following along the Rings of Saturn boot trace info, they could do so using this .nib image.

This disk also served up the missing link in identifying the DOS and protection scheme - it's DOS 3.3.1P, written by John Arkley. The coincidence of cracking Rings of Saturn and then encountering another lost program using the same scheme in the same week were surprising (and from different publishers too).

The INN, TITLE, and DM files all have a ctrl-N stuck as the second character, and it's these three files that have the protected sectors on the .nib image.

In the TITLE program, the author's name and address are still there too.

I've now uploaded both the .nib and .dsk images to Asimov for preservation.  

(thanks, Vlad!)

]HR