CBMSTUFF FORUM

I'm trying to dump several games to G64, to play in an emulator. But I keep getting disks errors, when I tried to use the G64 images in the WinVICE emulator. I tried using a nightly build of WinVICE and the SPS build of WinVICE 2.4a. I tried Hoxs 64 too, but it reports G64 track size is too long for all G64 images.

The various original games on disk are:
Back to the Future II
Black Hawk
California Games
Double Dragon
Ezoloa
Flight Deck
Ghetto Blaster
Labyrinth: The Computer Game
Murder on the Water Front
Rock'N'Wrestle
Skull Island
Starcross
Summer Games II
Tazz
Uridium
Zork II

I'm using a 360KB TANDON TM65-2L drive under SCP, C64/128 type, 48TPI, Weakbits Fixed, Low Density, Index Sensor Required, Index mode.

Is my 5.25" drive unable to read these disks properly, or am I doing something else wrong?
Is there any easy way to confirm whether the SCP/G64 image produced is bad? the SCP images look all red under Disk View in HxC, but I'm not sure if it recognizes C64 disk type.

I uploaded SCP and G64 images of a few games to my Google Drive as examples.

It could be that some or all of these particular games were not mastered using the index mark (California Games is for sure). So, these disks require SPLICE mode to duplicate, but you will not be able to create a .g64 for any non-indexed disk. This is a limitation of the current converter routine.

HxC does not support C64/128 disks at all.

Hoxs 64 has a problem supporting long tracks.

I will look at your samples.

Wow! You have a problem with your disk drive, power supply, or cabling. Most likely it is the drive. At first I thought it could be just a matter of cleaning, but there are tracks where there is a sine-wave pattern that is really not possible to generate like that with a disk. You can always load your flux (.scp) image into the editor/analyzer and click on the "Display Flux" button to see what the flux looks like. You should see 3 bands that are within 1us tall. You can see from your images that the bands are all over the place!

How are you powering this drive? Are you cleaning the heads before you attempt to image a disk? How long is the cable betwen SuperCard Pro and the drive?

Could the drive be going out of alignment at times? I don't have any alignment disks to use.

The floppy drive is connected directly to my computer's power supply.
A standard length floppy cable is been used, with the 5.25" drive connected at the end.
I have tried cleaning with Q-Tips several times, but I can't get directly under the sensor, due to the design.

The strange part is PC 360K disks seem to work fine at times, or do Commodore 64 disks require more accurate track reading?

I wish it was easier to find 5.25" disk drives for sale, very few are offered by local eBay, and they aren't always tested.

No, this is not an alignment issue. It's like the drive is powering on and off at random or something. There are tracks on various images that look like a nearly perfect sine wave, with some "splotches". I have never seen this before, and it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate this with valid magnetic media.

Do you have enough power in the power supply left to power the drive? This certainly looks like an electronics issue. Take a look at your BackToTheFutureII.scp image in the editor/analyzer. Load the image, and click on the Disk Flux button. That will open up a flux display window. Now, advance the tracks and look at the flux data.

There is no difference in the read/writing of any disk format. We are dealing with data at a flux level here.

I have a really over powered power supply (Zalman ZM850-HP), as the majority of my computer components are very low powered, since I try to save on power usage.

I noticed the floppy drive cable connection to the floppy drive is very loose though, could that be related?

A quick image of the floppy drive, when connected:

It could be that you have an intermittent connection from the edge card connector to that connector. I would clean the edge card connector with alcohol and a microfiber cloth. That connector should be a little bit difficult to slide over that edge card connector, so it could also be just a bad connector too.

I tried using a new cable directly from power supply to floppy drive, but it made no difference. Giving the edge connector a clean didn't make any difference either.

I took a closer look inside the floppy drive and it seems like the head isn't been lowered enough sometimes, but that only explains the wide variation in flux. I'm going to get someone to look closer at the floppy drive, and see if it can be repaired.

What would be the best game(s) to use for future tests, based on list above? games known to be able to generate a index G64 file, and which will work in WinVICE.

It is disappointing no C64 emulator offers direct SCP support, the Amiga side was so much easier.

It's not likely that the head not being lowered far enough is causing this problem. This is some type of electronics problem, like feedback, bad power, or something. You can't get that sine-wave generation due to anything associated with the media or head height. You could try a new floppy drive cable. It's possible that there is some sort of cross-talk, but I even doubt that. I have never seen anything like what your drive is periodically generating.

Back to the Future looks like it is indexed, but it's difficult to tell for sure because the flux is so bad.

other than the mentioned problems, the max. track length in the g64 header is also wrong