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Stuck on disk change in 5.25" King's Quest 1 1984 version, "That is the wrong disk"

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First post, by clb

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I am playing one of the earliest DOS versions of King's Quest 1 from 5.25" floppies. I used KryoFlux to write the floppies from archive.org title "Kings Quest I[ PC 360k]" uploaded by user Gypsy Dave. This scheme authors floppies that successfully carry the needed copy protection track, and the game starts ok from the copy protection check.

The version I have is not the booter version, but a MS-DOS installer based one.

However, I run into an issue - when entering a cabin west of the castle, the game prompts for the second floppy. However, inserting the second floppy does not help. In fact, what is most odd is that the game does not even attempt to read the disk drive, (the disk motor does not even attempt to spin up) but stays stuck on the disk change prompt dialog when pressing enter - so it can't possibly even know what disk has been inserted in the drive.

I have tried to debug if I would have an incorrectly written media, but tried writing (and playing) the disks using four different 5.25" floppy drives, all with the same result. Did a hex compare on the installed game files on hard disk from three different floppy drives to check if there might be a mismatch, but they all agree on the bits. So I am starting to think maybe this is some other issue.

Any ideas on what might be causing this? Not sure what to try anymore.

Reply 1 of 5, by cyclone3d

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I say it is the system or the disk drive itself.

Sounds like the system is not detecting a disk change and so the game is still seeing the file structure for Disk 1.

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Reply 2 of 5, by pentiumspeed

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The usual test with computers floppy drives is do a dir on a floppy disk, swap for different floppy disk and do a dir again. If correct, the listing will be different. If not, and do a control+c and redo dir and listing changes, then you have a change disk detect switch, cable with a pin disk change broken or floppy controller not working properly to detect this.

Solve these first to make sure you have working computer overall.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 3 of 5, by clb

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pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-12-30, 20:29:

The usual test with computers floppy drives is do a dir on a floppy disk, swap for different floppy disk and do a dir again. If correct, the listing will be different. If not, and do a control+c and redo dir and listing changes, then you have a change disk detect switch, cable with a pin disk change broken or floppy controller not working properly to detect this.

Solve these first to make sure you have working computer overall.

Cheers,

Tested this protocol on two of the four floppy drives I have, they both pass this check. That does not seem to be the issue.

The floppy drives do work, and the computer also otherwise works. I'll see if I can find another system to test on.

Reply 5 of 5, by clb

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This was tested on a 486 PC. I'll give it a try on a 8088 to see if that'll fix it, though I need to get a new floppy controller for that system in order to play it there.

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