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Fixing Pentomania CDT

Started by Novabug, 02:48, 12 November 21

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Novabug

Hello fellow Amstrad nutters. I wish to reach out to help find a solution to this little problem I have discovered.


I'm attempting to collect a full library of Alternative Software releases, which I have almost achieved. However, I wish to have all the cassettes in working condition (Original or Remastered) and have come across a issue with the game Pentomania, which appears on the Triple Decker 2 Snodits compilation release. I have attempted to clean up the CDT with no success. I can only get it to run via emulation, but not on a real 464. I have tried it on 3 different and fully working 464's by physical tape and TZXDuino methods.


It appears the original CDT master track is corrupted, with the data blocks to close together and the pitch of the data changing progressively higher as the CDT runs. It's not available on CPC Power most likely for this reason. Been looking into building a new, clean CDT from the working DSK file, but my knowledge has been exhausted on this despite attempts to build a working file with CDTMaster and CSW2CDT.


I know this is a small, forgotten little puzzle game, and really not much of interest, but If anyone can help or assist with creating a working CDT of this game, one that can be loaded and played from a cassette on a real 464, that would be really appreciated.

pelrun

It's two basic files and two binary files on the dsk, so creating a new cdt was pretty trivial. I extracted the files with iDSK, then inserted them into a new CDT with 2cdt.

Trying to repair a broken CDT by converting it to audio and back is bound to fail; since the CDT itself contains the actual data and timings editing it directly is the only real way forward (but requires deep knowledge of the format.)

Novabug

Many thanks, that worked a treat! Apologies for my average knowledge, I'll have to improve.


Thanks again.

The_Mole_UK

Quote from: pelrun on 06:32, 12 November 21
It's two basic files and two binary files on the dsk, so creating a new cdt was pretty trivial. I extracted the files with iDSK, then inserted them into a new CDT with 2cdt.
Would you be able to explain to me how you did this, what commands you used, what goes where please?   I've tried all afternoon to make a CDT with 2cdt but to no avail.  I can make simple bin files to cdt, but this is a little more complex.   Need some help.


Thanks...

pelrun

First I used iDSK to extract each file from the disk image, giving PENTOMAN, P-BASIC, P-CODE and SCR-CODE, including their AMSDOS headers (important, as 2cdt uses that information automatically)

Looking at the listing of PENTOMAN showed it needed to have the order of the files on tape as PENTOMAN, SCR-CODE, P-CODE and P-BASIC, with those specific names (no .BIN or .BAS extensions.)

So to generate that tape, I did:


# -n to erase any existing cdt content
2cdt -n -r PENTOMAN PENTOMAN pentoman.cdt
2cdt -r SCR-CODE SCR-CODE pentoman.cdt
2cdt -r P-CODE P-CODE pentoman.cdt
2cdt -r P-BASIC P-BASIC pentoman.cdt


By default 2cdt creates unnamed files on tape, so it's necessary to use -r to specify the destination filenames. Otherwise the loader runs forever looking for a filename that doesn't exist.

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