Is there CDT to Dsk Convertor Tool?

[dcdrac]

is there a tool to convert CDT files to DSK files that works with Windows 7?

[Neil79]

Wish there was, imagine playing DSK files through your mobile using the cassette input!

[Cholo]

I guess the trouble with CDTs is that that all those commercial games is protected in many many different ways. Infact even making working CDT from the real tapes can be really difficult (bordering on impossible in some cases). So doing the next step from CDT to DSK is just as difficult if not more as youll need to "crack" the data as well.

Luckily you can say that its a "old" problem as people also wanted their tape games converted to disc format back in the days. So even if there isnt a easy windows tool to do it, you can still emulate what they did back in the old days. Good emulators like WinApe can even emulate hardware like Multiface II that made making backups of protected games a bit easier in some cases. Still gonna require a fair amount of manual work in a emulator. Still copying something unprotected like a Elite Software game aka Commando, Ghost N Goblins, 1942 only takes a quick 5 mins with Amsback & CPCE due to the tape speedup.

[EgoTrip]

Providing that the format of the CDT allows it, you could always simply load up a program like JL Copy (it was on an AA tape), and use that to copy your tape to disk in an emulator.

The vast majority of commercial stuff already exists as DSK files though, so maybe its better to just download if they already exist.

[pelrun]

Wish there was, imagine playing DSK files through your mobile using the cassette input!

Oh man, that innocuous comment sent me on a quest to write something incredibly silly. 


I now have a toolchain that converts a DSK to a CDT that writes the image to the disk in drive A when it's run. Obviously, it's ridiculously slow, but you only need a tape cable to use it, unlike my original PC2CPC from the mid-90's that used the old parallel transfer cable.


Right now I'm spooling Tau Ceti into an emulator, in a couple more hours I might be able to test it. 


Edit: and it *almost* worked. I've tracked down the problem to 2cdt - certain files don't get properly written to the CDT, with a chunk of bytes at the beginning of the file going missing.


Edit 2: 0x80 bytes go missing... *facepalm* the sectors that are failing are the ones that contain the start of a file, so they've got a valid AMSDOS header in them... and 2cdt is being too clever by half and parsing it.

[redbox]

I now have a toolchain that converts a DSK to a CDT that writes the image to the disk in drive A when it's run. Obviously, it's ridiculously slow, but you only need a tape cable to use it, unlike my original PC2CPC from the mid-90's that used the old parallel transfer cable.

This would appear incredibly futile, but I simply love the concept (and execution!) purely because you've actually tried it 

[pelrun]

If there was any futility in what I've done, it was when I used this in an emulator - because I just ended up with another DSK at the end of it 



Time to try it on my 6128...

[arnoldemu]

you got me worried about 2cdt then

yes it recognises amsdos headers etc.

btw, although people think this tool is useless I do not.



Question about the tool:

This tool takes the data from a disk and a description of the sector ids and puts them into a file using 2cdt?

Then when it's run on a real cpc it reads it in and re-creates the dsk by formatting then writing the data?

Another question:

Does it recognise empty sectors and do any kind of compression to reduce the amount of data it needs to transfer? I think with discs that have few files on them it will not need to transfer much data.

[redbox]

btw, although people think this tool is useless I do not.

I don't think it's useless either - I said it appears futile, but infact isn't. 

I can imagine several scenarios where it would be very useful.  And as for having the time and dedication to make it - I admire the tool all the more for that...!

[arnoldemu]

I don't think it's useless either - I said it appears futile, but infact isn't. 

sorry, my misunderstanding.

[pelrun]

you got me worried about 2cdt then

yes it recognises amsdos headers etc.

Sorry about the scare It's certainly an unexpected case to have a file with a valid amsdos header that isn't *actually* the header for the file. I stuck a quick option in there to write the raw file to the cdt, without any parsing (although I then moved to whole tracks instead of individual sectors, so the problem went away.)

Question about the tool:

This tool takes the data from a disk and a description of the sector ids and puts them into a file using 2cdt?

Then when it's run on a real cpc it reads it in and re-creates the dsk by formatting then writing the data?

It pretty much puts the whole DSK file into the CDT almost unadulterated, with a small program at the start to read it in, parse it, and recreate the disk.

Another question:

Does it recognise empty sectors and do any kind of compression to reduce the amount of data it needs to transfer? I think with discs that have few files on them it will not need to transfer much data.

Not yet. I've downloaded Exomizer with a mind to compressing the tracks; but initially I've changed the CDT layout to minimise the number of separate files, put them in headerless and at 4000 baud, and used cngsoft's nice CALLBCA1 routine to read them in. Now only 13 seconds per track! New flashy border! (makes it faster, obviously!)

[pelrun]

And now I've got Exomizer jammed in there too. It's definitely worth it; a track filled with only one byte goes from 4k+ to 77 bytes!
The worst tracks on my test image were still about 1k smaller. One disk side only takes a few minutes to spool in now. Probably faster than the original game took to load off tape 

[arnoldemu]

Sorry about the scare It's certainly an unexpected case to have a file with a valid amsdos header that isn't *actually* the header for the file. I stuck a quick option in there to write the raw file to the cdt, without any parsing (although I then moved to whole tracks instead of individual sectors, so the problem went away.)

was it all zeros?

I need to fix that case in the tool.

[arnoldemu]

And now I've got Exomizer jammed in there too. It's definitely worth it; a track filled with only one byte goes from 4k+ to 77 bytes!
The worst tracks on my test image were still about 1k smaller. One disk side only takes a few minutes to spool in now. Probably faster than the original game took to load off tape 

You could preprocess it, then a track filled with 1 byte would become close to 1 byte
(excluding the ids LOL )

[pelrun]

was it all zeros?

No, it was a sector containing the beginning of a file. So it starts with the amsdos header of the file in the sector, but it's not the header of the sector file itself.

You could preprocess it, then a track filled with 1 byte would become close to 1 byte
(excluding the ids LOL )

What's the point? The leader on the block is already far longer than the block itself. I'm trying to make a useful (if silly) tool, not a demonstration of optimization masturbation 

[Devilmarkus]

I once begun coding a DSK tool in Java.
Goal was to transfer files from/to DSK.
Sadly it only supports 40 tracks DATA format yet...

But you can drag & drop CDT files into it and it then will extract all files from CDT to a blank DSK (Create new DSK first!)

Of course this only works for regular tapes (With regular headers)

JAR file!
If it doesnt open by default (double click) put a .bat file with content like:

java -jar DSKTool.jar

Have fun with it (Alpha, never finished)

[dcdrac]

I see a lot of class files but no jar files

[pelrun]

Rename the .zip to .jar and you should be good to go.

[Devilmarkus]

I see a lot of class files but no jar files

Well when you download and unzip the file I attached, you will see a jar file:

[attachimg=1]

When you unzipped it, and the DSKTool.jar opens up with your zip program, your registry entries are messed up and you need to put a .bat file into the folder... Containing: Java -jar DSKTool.jar

[pelrun]

pelrun/dsk2cdt2disc · GitHub