User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:08 am

Per Shot97's request, I've taken my original Colonel's Bequest floppy disks and pulled the ADFs off of them for download. You can find them on the game page below the game credits section.

My ADFs which I offer here are intro/crack-free. That being said, they are original, which means the off-disk copy protections schemes are still in place. You'll want to pull down the Copy Protection Hints which can be found on the same page in order to play the game.

Enjoy!

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:22 am

Thank you much! I'll be giving those a try. Should they install flawlessly, you may want to send them over to those people who sure don't seek things out much, tosec. You've got a labeling mistake on the page though, each link says disk 1, though they indeed download different disks.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:35 am

You're welcome! And all fixed on that typo. Thanks for catching that.

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:59 am

Cool! I have this game in original box but IIRC one of the disks has an error on it according to X-Copy scanner.
Thanks! I think i have a couple other sierra games, I know codename Iceman and some other games I'll have to check. I am behind in making adf's of my disks.

What did you use to make the adf? Amiga program, or on PC/Mac?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:06 pm

@ZippyZapp originally I was going to use transdisk, but it turns out that with Amiga Explorer hooked up via null modem cable it was far simpler to:
  • Put a floppy in DF0:
  • Go to the PC and open Amiga Explorer
  • See the ADF via Amiga Explorer in the root directory, then drag it to the PC's desktop. This killed 2 birds with one stone. It read the ADF on the Amiga, wrote it and moved it to the PC simultaneously. OMG it was slow, of course, but that was mostly due to the transfer which would have been slow anyway. All 5 disks probably took about half an hour to do while I surfed BBSes on the C64. <3
Then I put all of the disks back in the box and put the box back in storage for safe-keeping.

Note: this particular game requires 1MB of RAM to play or you will get a Guru meditation (no one here reading this will likely have an issue, but FYI).

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:17 pm

Hey I have used Amiga Explorer too with NULL modem cable it works great. I also bought that trans disk software from amigakit. It works decent. In the past, late 90's I used to copy a compressed ADF onto a IBM formatted floppy and transfer via PC0:

The nice thing about doing this on the A1200 is that the 1200 supports higher baud rate then the base 500/2000 so you can transfer faster. I think I managed to get 19200 to work on a 500 with a very minimal boot disk. But 9600 was more reliable. I think on 1200 you can squeeze 38400 or better especially if you make a minimal boot disk.

But I am going off topic again so thanks for doing this. I don't know why but I really dig writing floppies and doing all this transfer stuff. I find it fun for some odd reason. :mrgreen:

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:21 pm

Yeah, it's not weird. There is something quite comforting by backing this stuff up. I know some day these disks are going to become corrupted. So the more I can do to create these files (without crack intros - just pure copies of the disks that let you) the more at peace I become.

And I'm happy to put them here for others to use, too.

I was going to say (yet forgot) that originally I was going to use ADF Blitzer, but it doesn't work on OS 1.3. Only 2.0+. I found out the hard way. : /

But AExplorer was an awesome, easy solution.

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 12:38 pm

intric8 wrote:I know some day these disks are going to become corrupted.
Absolutely agreed. I was going to write a big long message with my experience with Amiga/Commodore disks but I have decided to start a new thread on the topic...

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:39 pm

Someday you should give the combination of transdisk and A-Explorer a try. Ever since I started it was instant, I was never going back to one disk at a time. It's especially useful when you just want to be lazy and not jump right to the Amiga every time you download a new disk. Collect a bunch of them; then use WinRAR to zip them on the PC. Don't use Windows built in zip manager though, for whatever reason it never works... Maybe it's a 64-bit thing, get WinRAR 32-bit to be safe. Compress them using the normal method, using a slower method gains you no compression and a longer wait on both the PC and Amiga end. But you'd be amazed at how compact adfs can get zipped.

Download "unzip" from Aminet for the Amiga. Send the zip over, and just go off to do other things... Or fiddle around in the background on the Amiga... I find by doing it this way, when I'm in the mood, I can throw them to the Amiga and just spend 10 minutes on another project. By the time I come back they're usually done. Since they're compacted it will always be faster than one at a time... I always throw them to the RAM drive at first to save more time.

From a shell it's nice and simple; unzip adfs.zip and it goes by pretty damn fast. Disk Master 2 has lha support built in, so you could just double click an lha file and it would unzip it, given you had the proper program. No such like with zips though... Perhaps DOpus would? Anyway, you'll need the shell anyway for transdisk. And I've never run across a windows program that will put something into LHA format, only stuff that will unzip it. Which sucks because LHA is actually a better format...

Transdisk will write to and from a disk in less than a minute on the actual Amiga. It's the serial cable that makes writing take so long, not the program. Less than one minute to write an adf using transdisk if it's already on the Amiga. The opposite would be true as well, just write some disks when you're in the mood on the Amiga, put them in a folder, you can archive using LHA on the Amiga... Send them to the PC when you get the chance.

It's one of those things that seems like it's too much to be bothered with, but once you do it once you'll never use AmigaExplorer to send disks one at a time again. Power using!!!

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:52 pm

Oh - totally. Crunching an ADF with transdisk is shockingly fast (and oddly noisy on my machine, not sure why it made my 2nd floppy kind of freak out, either). But my earlier point was I needed to create ADFs on the Amiga from original floppies and move those over to the PC. And, I see what you mean. I could have made them all, zipped them up then done one large transfer rather than 5 individual ones.

Since I have enough RAM, I can drag multiple disks from Amiga Explorer to the Amiga, but yes - zipping them up is a good idea. I hadn't considered the baud rate differences between later model Amigas and the 500/2000 for transferring files over. Makes sense. The zipping up (I use RARs on PC, too) part should shave that down a bit. That being said, it wasn't that bad. I was keeping busy while the machines did their thing.

Now I want to see if Opus can work with LHA files. I'll have to take a look!





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