VOGONS


First post, by hwh

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So, I picked up a guy's old box (floppy disk folder) of games a couple of years ago. In there is a pirated copy of Police Quest. They're all 5.25". It is on three disks, apparently copied from the originals countless years before.

Now, it would be trivial for me to copy the disk contents to the hard drive on the P100 I am using ATM to play these. But I just decided I would run it "traditionally" from disk. I did save games to the hard drive, because I'm not insane, but all reads were done by disk swapping. And it did work beautifully. There was the one disaster - I got a bad read once, second attempt worked. I thought, oh! Let me run scandisk, that totally won't destroy the disk completely. It found ONE bad sector, I marked it bad, and now the disk is virtually unusable with I think 315K allocated on 1.2MB formatting (the game is formatted as 3 360K disks, on 1.2MB media). But that's neither here nor there...

I was interested in trying to do the same with Police Quest II. That came on 6 5.25" disks and 3 3.5"s. I have a folder with the game of 1.8MB. Now how it worked in the first game was most files were on the first disk. The other two only had a couple of archives (resource.00, resource.01, &c.). In other words the stuff had to fit on the disk. When a new area is loaded the game asks for the disk corresponding to the archive containing that area - if it isn't on the existing disk of course. So for reasons of confusion and authenticity, it's best to have the right archives on the right disks.

The thing is, I can't find disk images for these games. People just dump everything into a folder with no file list. I don't have an original copy to know what is supposed to go where. Thinking some more, swapping 3 disks was a workout; swapping 6 is probably not fun. But it seems I couldn't do it if I wanted to. The game folder I have has archives of over 360K; therefore this apparently is a copy of the (720K) 3.5" version; yeah, why wouldn't you want that one? I assume (this is a pretty solid "assumption") the 5.25" version has a larger number of smaller archives that perhaps can be made to fit on a 360K disk. Damn, they probably should have looked into 1.2MB disks!

Thoughts?

Reply 1 of 4, by JudgeMonroe

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I'm surprised that they would bother packaging multiple sizes of the resource files instead of packing them for the lowest common denominator (360k disks) and just doubling them up on the 720k distribution masters. From what I can tell, the 360k distribution has a RESOURCE.00[1-6] for each of the six disks and everything else goes on disk 1.

Reply 2 of 4, by Spaz

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I took screenshots of the original disks for both PQ and PQII. See attached zip-files.

Attachments

  • Filename
    PQII disks layout.zip
    File size
    120.37 KiB
    Downloads
    49 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    PQ disks layout.zip
    File size
    85.04 KiB
    Downloads
    44 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 3 of 4, by Half-Saint

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The reason they went with 5.25" 360K disks is probably so that XT owners could play the games. I recently bought The Lost Treasures of Infocom and got ten 5.25" 350K disks. Copying them to the hard drive was quite fast so that worked okay.

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Reply 4 of 4, by hwh

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Hey, thanks Spaz. That shows the 360K disks do indeed contain smaller archives.

I ended up throwing it onto two 1.4MB disks; you can't even tell from a gameplay point of view it is on floppy disks (which is undoubtedly intentional) other than the very occasional trip to "disk 3." Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough for Police Quest II, so...guess I'm walking away from that one.