It’s been a few weeks since the last post on here. There’s a combination of reasons, one of which is the size of the book I’m reading but the main delay is that I’ve been playing some of the games I’ve been meaning to get around to for years. I recently started on Wasteland which has led on to the rest of the Fallout series and I’m partway into Fallout 2 at the moment. I loved Wasteland and Fallout and would recommend them to anyone with a passing interest in RPG’s. After the high standards so far, Fallout 2 is a bit disappointing in all honesty. It’s falling into RPG clichés with many of the quests and just isn’t as polished or original as the first game. It makes up for the shortfalls in sheer size which may be the cause of its problems in the first place. This series will be seriously eating into my time for the next month or two anyway so the posts could be a little infrequent. I’ll definitely get the next book finished this weekend.

I’d usually leave the news reporting to other sites but I can’t let some of the events from this week pass unmentioned. Top of the list has to be EA signing up with GOG to release 25 games, including some of the classics from Origin. They have started off with Privateer, Underworld 1 + 2 and Dungeon Keeper. Whoever picked these games clearly has good taste as they would have to be 3 of my favourite titles from EA’s catalog. I’d have put System Shock in there myself but I gather that isn’t getting a re-release for the moment due to licensing issues which is a crying shame. Hopefully they can be sorted out in the long run. For the moment we definitely have the Crusader games following soon and presumably the Ultima series. I can live without the Runes Of Virtue games but I hope that the Worlds Of Ultima games aren’t forgotten this time and finally see the light of day again.

It does occur to me that its very easy to think of more than 25 EA games that should be on GOG without even including Origin. I doubt that we will see the older games like Autoduel or 2400AD as GOG have previously ignored games from this era outside of compilations. This is understandable but it would be nice to see these games on there with a really cheap price point of $2-3. There should be more chance of seeing the more modern but slightly obscure titles like Pacific Strike or Cybermage but it is hard to second guess which games GOG will release from what I’ve seen so far. They have had the Activision license for ages and we still haven’t seen the Quest For Glory games, but we have had Police Quest. I like the Police Quest series and all that but Quest For Glory is a true classic.

In one sense, there isn’t much reason for me to be excited about any of these games getting a re-release since I expect out of the 25, I’ll probably own around 20 of them already and the rest will be titles that don’t interest me. It’s very significant that a giant like EA has agreed to go DRM free with GOG though and if classic games are ever going to find a modern audience they need to be available in this format. It may be one of my favourite games but how much a game like Underworld would interest a modern player, I don’t know. I’d be very curious to know what the demographic is like at GOG and the age of the people who have bought all these games. I’d expect it to be mostly people in their 30’s like myself, picking up old favourites or classics that they never played at the time but I’ve no idea whether that is the case.

The re-releases are not all good news. Underworld is apparently missing the install files. This means that you can’t easily change the sound system and are stuck with adlib sound. Given the progress with MUNT this is clearly not the way to play the game. Righteous Fire isn’t included with Privateer, again for licensing reasons although I have no idea what those could be. You also don’t get Deeper Dungeons with Dungeon Keeper, which isn’t that big a deal in my opinion but it should really have been in there. What strikes me with all this is that you are arguably better off just buying the games on Ebay. If you aren’t bothered about having the original boxes (which you don’t get with GOG anyway) you could probably get them for a similar price without having to lose the expansion packs. Whatever your prefered format, all 3 titles are essential gaming and if you’ve never played them, you should stop reading this and go buy them.

On the same day, we have also had the launch of ultimaforever.com, although the site appears to be up and down like a yo-yo. When you can access it, the site isn’t anything to write home about unfortunately. What we get on there, for now, is a single page with the free download of Ultima 4 which had been widely available for years until EA started chasing people down, and is still on 2 other websites legitimately. It’s the same version of the game and isn’t even packaged with DOSBox. You do get the cluebook although that’s been on replacementdocs for 5 years now. Looking at the website, I can’t help but notice the dodgy box art for all the games. It appears that EA don’t have the artwork for the side panels and for a professional website it doesn’t look great. Until they get some more content, the only significance to this site for now is that it confirms that a new Ultima is on the way, but we all knew that already. I have a bad feeling about how that might turn out so I’m not going to get my hopes up but I’ll certainly give it a go whenever it arrives, provided it isn’t just another MMORPG.

In one last piece of news, the Origin brand lives again! Sort of. EA is launching its own download service today, called for whatever reason Origin. If they hadn’t just released some classic games on the same day, I’d think they were taking the mick but I guess I can live with it in the circumstances. The service is launching with 150 titles so we may see an actual Origin game or two on there but I’d expect it to concentrate on much more recent titles and leave the older games to GOG.

Aside from Origin, the one thing all this news has in common is digital downloads, which isn’t something that I’m a huge fan of. I only ever buy anything in that format if it is extremely cheap as you can regularly get a boxed original for the same price or less. If GOG’s ill-judged stunt last year (where they pretended to be closing down) proved anything, it is that if you don’t own a hard copy of a game, you don’t own the game at all. GOG is an exception here to be fair, as long as you back up your downloads, but I doubt this will be the case with EA’s Origin. Digital downloads is the way the industry is going and this move by EA is another large step toward the death of physical media. I’m clearly in the minority wanting hard copies. I can see that having about 7 bookcases full of games isn’t for everyone and there are plenty of advantages to services like Steam but I’d rather be working toward the 8th bookcase myself, not that I need any more games.

Something I’ve been wanting to do as I’m reading my way through Origin’s books is to make them available online for anyone who wants them as either scans or ebooks. I’ve benefited enough from other people’s scans so it’s good to contribute something back in return. I also much prefer ebooks to the real thing these days so I’d be doing myself a favour in the process. The major problem with this is that my scanner is, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. Unless I’m prepared to ruin the original book, I end up with anything within an inch of the spine of the book blacked out or completely out of focus.

So, I’ve bought myself a book scanner. At the money I’ve paid, it still won’t be brilliant but it is designed to scan right to the edge meaning that I can scan a book quickly and without ruining it. At least that’s the theory as I’m still waiting for it to be delivered. I’ll see how it works out but the plan is to scan each book as I get to it. I’ll post anything that I think they will accept to replacementdocs, but host it here as well until it’s approved.

In the meanwhile, I’ve got a few ebooks and scans from various sources, most of which are available elsewhere but I’ll host them as well for the sake of convenience. I’ve created a downloads page to link all this stuff from which you should find at the top of the ever-growing menu on the right. For now, there are a load of Wing Commander ebooks, better scans of the U7 and SI cluebooks than those I put up a week or two back, the Official Book of Ultima and the System Shock cluebook.

I got a request yesterday from one of the guys at Kryoflux who had found the blog and he asked if I could make clear the situation with the replacement board being OK. I’m stuck covering the office today and as you might expect there isn’t much going on so I thought if I was going to do that, I may as well write up a short review to pass the time:-

The Kryoflux was developed by the Software Preservation Society as a tool for preserving disks. It is a small circuit board which allows you to connect a floppy drive and read disks through a USB interface. That doesn’t sound like anything special, except for the fact that the board is able to read at a very low level and can read disks from any system. Better still it will do this with most standard PC 1.44Mb and 1.2Mb drives and it’s also able to image any copy protection. If you go back far enough, near enough every game had some form of protection although this gave way to things like code wheels as games got larger and were installed to hard disks. Before the Kryoflux, the SPS had a system for reading disks using an Amiga but I think this was less versatile and having to use Amiga’s is not ideal.

So why would you care about having disk images in the first place. A few reasons come to mind. I think the goals of the SPS of preserving every game for all these systems is a noble one and worth supporting and this is a means of helping them out. After imaging the disks, I can upload them to their ftp server for them ultimately to mix and match tracks with other peoples scans to make perfect unaltered disk images. In theory, I gather that they will ultimately send me DRAFT files of the disks when they have them which would be very welcome for where I’ve got disks with bad sectors. Floppy disks do degrade over time and many are already past their life expectancies. If they aren’t imaged soon it will never be possible.

As far as just playing the games goes, for years I’ve tended to use abandonware sites rather than my own disks if I’ve wanted to play a game. There are a few potential problems with this. First off, there is no guarantee that I’m even going to be able to find the game. Secondly, if it’s from an abandonware site, it invariably means the game has been cracked. Not necessarily a problem if the crack works as it should but they often don’t.

As an example, I was trying to play Epic a few months back. I own the game but my disk 3 packed in on me within a couple of months of buying the game so I’m forced to get it from an abandonware site. This is easy enough and it seems to work OK, until I get to mission 2 and during the briefing the game hangs for about 10 minutes before eventually distorting the next few cut scenes and allowing me to carry on. Another example would be Monkey Island 2 where the crack removes the ability to choose which level you want to play at, as the game originally had a Monkey Lite mode.

Another issue is games that aren’t necessarily cracked but are missing the install program or drivers. Having a couple of MT-32 synthesisers, I obviously want to use them to play games where possible but nearly every game is set up to use adlib by default and if the drivers and/or setup programs have been stripped from the download to save space then I have no way to swap to MT-32. Finally, there is just the fact that I’d like to play the game as I remember it and in it’s original form and the copy protection while annoying in some games was part of the experience in others.

The board is available as part of various packages or on it’s own. You have the option of buying things like floppy cables, power supples (for the floppy drive), USB cables, etc… from Kryoflux as part of the package. They are cheap enough if you need them but I’ll just look at the board itself.

It is quite small with several connections although the only ones I’ve needed to use are the standard USB connection and the floppy cable socket. There are jumpers on the board which can be used to set it up to work with either one or two drives and another jumper which clears the firmware. Your PC uploads the firmware every time you plug it in so this last one isn’t likely to be used often. The drive doesn’t attempt to act as a standard floppy interface as such, so you can’t access your disk drive through My Computer in Windows. Instead you have to create disk images using (at the time of writing) a command line tool called DTC. Like most command line interfaces, this feels a little unwieldy at first but is actually quite efficient when you get used to it. A GUI version is in development but isn’t available at the time of writing.

DTC gives the option to export straight to various formats of disk image, although if you want a preservation level scan the only option available for the moment is RAW format. This gives quite a file size considering how little data is actually on one of these disks with a single 1.44 Mb floppy being in the order of 70Mb. It also has separate files for every track on each side of the disk leading to 160 files+ for each disk. These files all add up and I think I was up to about 40Gb by the time I finished imaging everything and I’ve still not done my C64 or Apple 2 disks. Another file format (DRAFT) will be supported soon which will get this file size down to some extent and also reduces it to one file per disk. DTC will be able to covert into this format from RAW so I won’t have to re-image my disks thankfully.

Once you’ve settled into the process, reading the disks is reasonably quick although full preservation level scans do 5 rotations for each track slowing it down considerably. As you might expect, reading all these old disks you get a lot of disk errors at first. A straight preservation level scan will read the disk as is and will make no attempt to validate what it is reading. However you can simultaneously, export to a particular formats image type. I.e. a .img for PC disks. This will validate each sector of the disk and retry as many or as few times as you like. This is one of the best aspects of a tool like this, in that you can just leave it doing 1000 retries. The process isn’t perfect however and unless I’m missing a trick, it can occasionally fall foul of it’s own flexibility. For example, if you are doing retries to read that one bad sector, it’s not uncommon for one of the retries not to find that sector in the first place so it reads 17 good sectors, doesn’t realise that the 18th sector is missing and then moves on. It is possible to specify the number of sectors, but it still moves on marking it as having a missing sector so it doesn’t help. There may be an option I could set to solve this but I haven’t found it. I kept my eye on the scans to some extent. but as you would expect imaging all these disks took a lot of time and was more a job I could do at the same time as I was doing something else, so it got nowhere near my full attention. I’d quite like it if there was a quick message at the end of the process which says whether anything unexpected happened, rather than having to sift through pages and pages of text. For the most part DTC does its job well though, and will only improve as it is worked on.

I’ve found that often with my old disks, reading them the first time is tricky but subsequently they read flawlessly. The old technique of breathing on the disk while rotating it works as well as ever for cleaning them off and Kryoflux allows you to start and finish at any particular track so you can pick up where you left off rather than restarting at the beginning. IMG files created like this won’t work as they are missing the earlier sectors, but it is easy enough to recreate .img’s from the raw image data using the DTC tool. This process doesn’t require the kryoflux board. An option to pause the process while you are breathing on the disk would be nice, so that I didn’t have to alter the command line each time on particularly dirty disks.

I’ve had no problems at all with any PC, Amiga, ST or Mac disks. C64 games are a problem as they are usually on flippy disks which you had to insert upside down to read the second side. Due to various limitations with most drives these aren’t readable without either butchering the disk with a second index hole or some surgery on your floppy drive. This will never be solvable purely by using a standard drive unfortunately so it’s not a limitation of the Kryoflux. I’ve also had very mixed results with Apple 2 disks. Since I don’t have an Apple 2 to try them out on, it could just be my disks that are the problem but I don’t think DTC supports a lot of the strange file formats used on these disks yet. They also have the same issue with reading the second side. I’m primarily into PC games however. When I own something in another format, it’s only because I couldn’t get it on PC at the right price at the time or because it didn’t come out on PC first time around, so I’m not actually that worried about getting images of these disks myself. I didn’t have any luck with my California Pacific Ultima which would have been the exception here. Just looking at the disk surface, makes me think there was never much hope as it is slightly mottled. My big box Ultima 2 disks will only be a couple of years newer and these read perfectly on the other hand.

So once you’ve got all these perfect disk images, what can you actually do with them. Here lies another problem as things stand. The Kryoflux will eventually offer the ability to write images, although I’m expecting you will need very specific drives for this to work correctly with copy protection. Being able to reproduce the disks would be a very nice feature but not something I’d be likely to use very often myself. I’m more interested in just playing the games through emulation. Being a PC gamer, this usually means Dosbox which is where the problem lies. Dosbox’s disk support seems to have actually degraded over earlier versions, with for instance the ability to swap disk images not being in the latest version. It also only supports straight “.img”‘s which don’t contain enough detail to reproduce copy protection. Basically this means that even after you have your perfect disk images, you still can’t play a lot of the games. Many can be installed by extracting the disk contents into a directory. Others can be installed through a virtual machine and then moved to Dosbox, but anything with copy protection is unplayable until Dosbox adds support for the DRAFT file format. I gather that a few emulators for other systems have already done this, but as a PC gamer I’m stuck waiting in the meanwhile. At least I know that I have a disk image ready, and unlike the disks themselves this image isn’t going to degrade with time.

To get back to the initial point that prompted this post, the first board I received was faulty out of the box, presumably having been bounced around in the post. I received quick responses to this and ultimately a replacement board which has worked fine. As far as I know, I was the only person to have any problems from an initial run of 80. A second batch has just arrived and is in stock so if you fancy one of these for yourself, you may just have chance if you get your order in now (assuming they haven’t already been sold on pre-orders). I think the package I bought was around 90 Euros, which is fairly expensive in my eyes but it’s a limited market and there is nothing else available that will do the same job. I don’t imagine there is exactly a lot of profit being made on these, and when you add in the effort that has done into it, I’m sure it’s a labour of love for anyone involved. If you have the skills, the full specs are also available on the kryoflux website for anyone to build their own.

There is plenty of scope to improve usability still but most of this lies in other software as far as I’m concerned. A command line tool isn’t the most user-friendly but this is a gadget aimed at enthusiasts who won’t have a problem with it. Ultimately, I’d like to see the DRAFT file format become a standard that you expect to see supported on any home computer emulator. Alternatively, a Windows 7 floppy emulator with DRAFT support would do the job nicely, since this could immediately plug into any emulator with support for a real floppy drive. If it was possible (and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be) to write a windows device driver to allow you to use a drive directly through Windows with the Kryoflux that could also be useful. For the moment, if you have a load of disks you want to back up, this does the job perfectly but it still doesn’t quite achieve what I’d like through no fault of it’s developers. Fingers crossed that Dosbox support is on the way.

If you fancy one of these boards, or want more details the website is at http://www.kryoflux.com.

I’m posting this inbetween getting a few beers after work, and heading out again for a few more. My usual lapse standards of proof reading haven’t been followed so apologies if this review doesn’t read all that well. I’d like to wish a happy Xmas to all and I’ll be back in a couple of days, probably with another book review.

Noctropolis and it’s clue book have arrived which has given me a chance to look them over. I can confirm that the clue book was published by Origin although they haven’t gone out of their way to advertise this. The game initially appears to have no mention of Origin, until you read the technical manual and learn that if you want to get help you have to get in touch with Origin technical support. In fact the manual itself looks exactly like one of Origins from this period.

That’s the only mention of Origin I can find. The game itself was developed by Flashpoint Studios who were an independent developer who got bought out by Bethesda in 1996. My guess is that when EA signed up the game, they wouldn’t rely entirely on an external company to simply hand over a finished product so Origin were brought in during the final stages to publish, test and support it. I’d have expected it to say Origin on the box rather than just EA under these circumstances, but I guess that would be up to EA. The only other game on Mobygames from Flashpoint was a golf game published by Sega so this appears to be their only title published by EA.

It’s not unheard of for Origin to publish external developers games although I expect they would usually have more involvement than this, e.g. Ultima Underworld and System Shock. There was also Shadowcaster which was developed by Raven and Abuse which I don’t think had any Origin involvement at all. Abuse was possibly the most obscure but the box did at least carry the Origin logo (although you wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it). It’s less clear with Noctropolis but from the evidence I’ve got it deserves a place in the blog as much as Abuse did so I’ll be playing it after F-15 to finish off (as far as I know), the complete list of games published and/or developed by Origin.

I still haven’t started F-15 as I’ve been busy imaging all my disks with the kryoflux. I’m glad to say that these are more or less done and uploaded for the Software Preservation Society to use as they see fit. I’ll start on F-15 today, which I can’t say I’m especially looking forward to but I am quite interested in playing Noctropolis when I’ve got it out of the way so it’s giving me the incentive to get going again.

I was going to start on F-15 a couple of days back but the Windows 98 PC which I’d only had working for a few days has already conked out. It still works to some extent but there is something wrong with the cmos. If I clear the bios settings it boots with defaults (which are too fast so it crashes shortly afterwards). If I update the settings then it locks as soon as the machine tries to boot again until the bios is cleared. The motherboard was ropey in the first place which was why the PC was shelved several years back, so I’ve given in on it and bought a salvaged Pentium 4 off Ebay, basically for the price of postage. That’s arrived but it still needs everything setting up.

In the meanwhile, I thought I’d put this post up to see if anyone knows anything about the game Noctropolis. I noticed in the playtesters bio’s in my last post that a couple of the testers had moved onto Noctopolis after Wing Commander Armada. I’d not heard of this game and figured it was possibly a project that got cancelled. So I looked it up and it turns out to be be a comic book adventure game which was developed by another studio and published by EA in 1994. I would assume that the testers were simply shifted around within EA but it turns out that the clue book for the game was also published by Origin.

This makes me wonder just what Origin’s connection to Noctropolis was. Have I found another game I ought to be playing in this blog? Even if it doesn’t make it into the blog, I’m always up for a new adventure game so I’ve ordered copies of both the clue book and the game but it will probably be 2 weeks before I get my hands on either of them.

If anyone can shed any light on Origin’s involvement, I’d like to hear from you. From looking at the credits on Mobygames, it appears that Origin staff just headed up the QA on the game although that doesn’t entirely explain why they ended up publishing the cluebook.