Re: Dark Crystal and Time Zone

[Ivan X <ivan@ivanx.com>]

On Jan 18, 8:19 pm, Tempest <temp...@atariprotos.com> wrote:
> Are there standard .dsk files for these games?  All I see in Asimov
> are .nib files which ADTPro does not like (it crashes it when I try to
> transfer the game).

Yup, I know a whole lot about Time Zone. One day, I might even solve
it.

The reason the files are in NIB format is that the game checks the
volume number to see that the correct disk is in the drive. Disk 1A is
volume number 2, Disk 1B is 3, Disk 2C is 4, and so forth up to 13.
The save disk was originally 252 but in my modded version I changed it
to 254. There's no copy protection; it's just that the volume number
can't be stored in a DSK image, hence the NIBs. (Emulators assume the
volume number is 254 for DSK images.)

As suggested earlier, you should be able to use DOS 3.3 on your Apple
II to format your disks with volume numbers 2 through 13 (e.g. INIT
HELLO,V8). Then, you could use a sector copier (e.g. COPYA, Copy II
Plus) within an emulator to copy each NIB to a DSK, and send those via
ADTPro to the corresponding blank disk. I don't have an ADTPro setup
to test this, but as long as ADTPro doesn't reformat the disks when it
writes, it should work.

I was able to confirm an alternative solution. ShrinkIt (the ProDOS 8
verison, not GS-Shrinkit) will preserve the volume number of a whole-
disk archive. So you can run ShrinkIt in an emulator, have it create
whole disk archives of each NIB file, and then run ShrinkIt on the
Apple II to turn those into functional disks. Of course, you've still
got to work out getting ShrinkIt and the archives to the Apple II; one
way would be to save several disk sides (they compress heavily) to a
couple of disk images, then shoot those and if needed a ShrinkIt disk
(search for "PDShrinkIts.dsk") over to the Apple II via ADTPro.

Unless your Apple II has only a single 5.25" drive, I highly suggest
using my modified "multidrive" version of Time Zone. Even if you only
have two drives, it eliminates the hassle of swapping the save disk
(because you can leave it in drive 2), and more importantly the images
work in most emulators. Some of the original posted NIB images would
yield I/O errors when used in anything other than AppleWin Beta 2 with
Enhance Disk Speed enabled. Also, on my version, you can format any
disk for saves (as long as the volume number is 254, which it normally
would be, unless you specified otherwise or used ProDOS System
Utilities to format it).

As an aside, in principle the .2mg format is, in theory, supposed to
be able to represent a 140K disks, including the volume number,
potentially making it an attractive format for the Time Zone images
for use with both emulators and ADTPro. In practice, the format is
rarely used for DOS 3.3-type disks, and none of the programs I tried
(Virtual II and Sweet16 for Mac OS X, DiskMaker 8 and DSK2File for
ProDOS 8) honor the volume number, if they even recognize .2MG for a
disk that size at all. I don't have a functioning ADTPro setup, but I
would guess that it too ignores the volume number.

Ivan.