Kryoflux review

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I got a request yesterday from one of the guys at Kryoflux who had found the blog and he asked if I could make clear the situation with the replacement board being OK. I’m stuck covering the office today and as you might expect there isn’t much going on so I thought if I was going to do that, I may as well write up a short review to pass the time:-

The Kryoflux was developed by the Software Preservation Society as a tool for preserving disks. It is a small circuit board which allows you to connect a floppy drive and read disks through a USB interface. That doesn’t sound like anything special, except for the fact that the board is able to read at a very low level and can read disks from any system. Better still it will do this with most standard PC 1.44Mb and 1.2Mb drives and it’s also able to image any copy protection. If you go back far enough, near enough every game had some form of protection although this gave way to things like code wheels as games got larger and were installed to hard disks. Before the Kryoflux, the SPS had a system for reading disks using an Amiga but I think this was less versatile and having to use Amiga’s is not ideal.

So why would you care about having disk images in the first place. A few reasons come to mind. I think the goals of the SPS of preserving every game for all these systems is a noble one and worth supporting and this is a means of helping them out. After imaging the disks, I can upload them to their ftp server for them ultimately to mix and match tracks with other peoples scans to make perfect unaltered disk images. In theory, I gather that they will ultimately send me DRAFT files of the disks when they have them which would be very welcome for where I’ve got disks with bad sectors. Floppy disks do degrade over time and many are already past their life expectancies. If they aren’t imaged soon it will never be possible.

As far as just playing the games goes, for years I’ve tended to use abandonware sites rather than my own disks if I’ve wanted to play a game. There are a few potential problems with this. First off, there is no guarantee that I’m even going to be able to find the game. Secondly, if it’s from an abandonware site, it invariably means the game has been cracked. Not necessarily a problem if the crack works as it should but they often don’t.

As an example, I was trying to play Epic a few months back. I own the game but my disk 3 packed in on me within a couple of months of buying the game so I’m forced to get it from an abandonware site. This is easy enough and it seems to work OK, until I get to mission 2 and during the briefing the game hangs for about 10 minutes before eventually distorting the next few cut scenes and allowing me to carry on. Another example would be Monkey Island 2 where the crack removes the ability to choose which level you want to play at, as the game originally had a Monkey Lite mode.

Another issue is games that aren’t necessarily cracked but are missing the install program or drivers. Having a couple of MT-32 synthesisers, I obviously want to use them to play games where possible but nearly every game is set up to use adlib by default and if the drivers and/or setup programs have been stripped from the download to save space then I have no way to swap to MT-32. Finally, there is just the fact that I’d like to play the game as I remember it and in it’s original form and the copy protection while annoying in some games was part of the experience in others.

The board is available as part of various packages or on it’s own. You have the option of buying things like floppy cables, power supples (for the floppy drive), USB cables, etc… from Kryoflux as part of the package. They are cheap enough if you need them but I’ll just look at the board itself.

It is quite small with several connections although the only ones I’ve needed to use are the standard USB connection and the floppy cable socket. There are jumpers on the board which can be used to set it up to work with either one or two drives and another jumper which clears the firmware. Your PC uploads the firmware every time you plug it in so this last one isn’t likely to be used often. The drive doesn’t attempt to act as a standard floppy interface as such, so you can’t access your disk drive through My Computer in Windows. Instead you have to create disk images using (at the time of writing) a command line tool called DTC. Like most command line interfaces, this feels a little unwieldy at first but is actually quite efficient when you get used to it. A GUI version is in development but isn’t available at the time of writing.

DTC gives the option to export straight to various formats of disk image, although if you want a preservation level scan the only option available for the moment is RAW format. This gives quite a file size considering how little data is actually on one of these disks with a single 1.44 Mb floppy being in the order of 70Mb. It also has separate files for every track on each side of the disk leading to 160 files+ for each disk. These files all add up and I think I was up to about 40Gb by the time I finished imaging everything and I’ve still not done my C64 or Apple 2 disks. Another file format (DRAFT) will be supported soon which will get this file size down to some extent and also reduces it to one file per disk. DTC will be able to covert into this format from RAW so I won’t have to re-image my disks thankfully.

Once you’ve settled into the process, reading the disks is reasonably quick although full preservation level scans do 5 rotations for each track slowing it down considerably. As you might expect, reading all these old disks you get a lot of disk errors at first. A straight preservation level scan will read the disk as is and will make no attempt to validate what it is reading. However you can simultaneously, export to a particular formats image type. I.e. a .img for PC disks. This will validate each sector of the disk and retry as many or as few times as you like. This is one of the best aspects of a tool like this, in that you can just leave it doing 1000 retries. The process isn’t perfect however and unless I’m missing a trick, it can occasionally fall foul of it’s own flexibility. For example, if you are doing retries to read that one bad sector, it’s not uncommon for one of the retries not to find that sector in the first place so it reads 17 good sectors, doesn’t realise that the 18th sector is missing and then moves on. It is possible to specify the number of sectors, but it still moves on marking it as having a missing sector so it doesn’t help. There may be an option I could set to solve this but I haven’t found it. I kept my eye on the scans to some extent. but as you would expect imaging all these disks took a lot of time and was more a job I could do at the same time as I was doing something else, so it got nowhere near my full attention. I’d quite like it if there was a quick message at the end of the process which says whether anything unexpected happened, rather than having to sift through pages and pages of text. For the most part DTC does its job well though, and will only improve as it is worked on.

I’ve found that often with my old disks, reading them the first time is tricky but subsequently they read flawlessly. The old technique of breathing on the disk while rotating it works as well as ever for cleaning them off and Kryoflux allows you to start and finish at any particular track so you can pick up where you left off rather than restarting at the beginning. IMG files created like this won’t work as they are missing the earlier sectors, but it is easy enough to recreate .img’s from the raw image data using the DTC tool. This process doesn’t require the kryoflux board. An option to pause the process while you are breathing on the disk would be nice, so that I didn’t have to alter the command line each time on particularly dirty disks.

I’ve had no problems at all with any PC, Amiga, ST or Mac disks. C64 games are a problem as they are usually on flippy disks which you had to insert upside down to read the second side. Due to various limitations with most drives these aren’t readable without either butchering the disk with a second index hole or some surgery on your floppy drive. This will never be solvable purely by using a standard drive unfortunately so it’s not a limitation of the Kryoflux. I’ve also had very mixed results with Apple 2 disks. Since I don’t have an Apple 2 to try them out on, it could just be my disks that are the problem but I don’t think DTC supports a lot of the strange file formats used on these disks yet. They also have the same issue with reading the second side. I’m primarily into PC games however. When I own something in another format, it’s only because I couldn’t get it on PC at the right price at the time or because it didn’t come out on PC first time around, so I’m not actually that worried about getting images of these disks myself. I didn’t have any luck with my California Pacific Ultima which would have been the exception here. Just looking at the disk surface, makes me think there was never much hope as it is slightly mottled. My big box Ultima 2 disks will only be a couple of years newer and these read perfectly on the other hand.

So once you’ve got all these perfect disk images, what can you actually do with them. Here lies another problem as things stand. The Kryoflux will eventually offer the ability to write images, although I’m expecting you will need very specific drives for this to work correctly with copy protection. Being able to reproduce the disks would be a very nice feature but not something I’d be likely to use very often myself. I’m more interested in just playing the games through emulation. Being a PC gamer, this usually means Dosbox which is where the problem lies. Dosbox’s disk support seems to have actually degraded over earlier versions, with for instance the ability to swap disk images not being in the latest version. It also only supports straight “.img”‘s which don’t contain enough detail to reproduce copy protection. Basically this means that even after you have your perfect disk images, you still can’t play a lot of the games. Many can be installed by extracting the disk contents into a directory. Others can be installed through a virtual machine and then moved to Dosbox, but anything with copy protection is unplayable until Dosbox adds support for the DRAFT file format. I gather that a few emulators for other systems have already done this, but as a PC gamer I’m stuck waiting in the meanwhile. At least I know that I have a disk image ready, and unlike the disks themselves this image isn’t going to degrade with time.

To get back to the initial point that prompted this post, the first board I received was faulty out of the box, presumably having been bounced around in the post. I received quick responses to this and ultimately a replacement board which has worked fine. As far as I know, I was the only person to have any problems from an initial run of 80. A second batch has just arrived and is in stock so if you fancy one of these for yourself, you may just have chance if you get your order in now (assuming they haven’t already been sold on pre-orders). I think the package I bought was around 90 Euros, which is fairly expensive in my eyes but it’s a limited market and there is nothing else available that will do the same job. I don’t imagine there is exactly a lot of profit being made on these, and when you add in the effort that has done into it, I’m sure it’s a labour of love for anyone involved. If you have the skills, the full specs are also available on the kryoflux website for anyone to build their own.

There is plenty of scope to improve usability still but most of this lies in other software as far as I’m concerned. A command line tool isn’t the most user-friendly but this is a gadget aimed at enthusiasts who won’t have a problem with it. Ultimately, I’d like to see the DRAFT file format become a standard that you expect to see supported on any home computer emulator. Alternatively, a Windows 7 floppy emulator with DRAFT support would do the job nicely, since this could immediately plug into any emulator with support for a real floppy drive. If it was possible (and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be) to write a windows device driver to allow you to use a drive directly through Windows with the Kryoflux that could also be useful. For the moment, if you have a load of disks you want to back up, this does the job perfectly but it still doesn’t quite achieve what I’d like through no fault of it’s developers. Fingers crossed that Dosbox support is on the way.

If you fancy one of these boards, or want more details the website is at http://www.kryoflux.com.

I’m posting this inbetween getting a few beers after work, and heading out again for a few more. My usual lapse standards of proof reading haven’t been followed so apologies if this review doesn’t read all that well. I’d like to wish a happy Xmas to all and I’ll be back in a couple of days, probably with another book review.

Ultima Online 2 – Action Figures

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So much for the quick start on Noctropolis. Between various Christmas-time distractions, office parties, flu and the various other projects I’m involved in, I haven’t got around to doing any more than playing the first ten minutes to get a feel for it. I can’t see me starting it properly for a little while now so by way of filler, here is a short piece on some more Origin memorabilia. Apologies in advance for the quality of the photos. I had a choice between my webcam or my phone neither of which is ideal for this.

These series of 6 action figures were planned to be brought out to tie in with Ultima Online 2 back in 2002 and were manufactured by McFarlane Toys who I gather make plenty of other similar figures. I understand that a contract of some description was agreed between them and Origin whereby the figures had to be manufactured and sold but this ran into a major hitch when Ultima Online 2 was cancelled by EA, rendering the figures obsolete. Not to be put off, they were rebranded as Ultima Online (minus the 2) figures and sold anyway. At least they tried to sell them. Sealed copies can be picked up for next to nothing which suggests that plenty were left over afterwards. In fact, if you go on Ebay you will be hard pushed to find any that aren’t sealed.
Ultima Online 2 was planned to be a major departure in the series and to introduce technology to the world of Ultima. This went as far as cybernetic’s leading to the likes of Robo-Blackthorn below:

How this could ever be marketed as an Ultima Online figure is beyond me, but it certainly stands as a curiosity. I vaguely remember a similar screenshot being released back when UO2 was being developed to vast outcry from UO2 fans. Since I had little interest in UO in the first place, I didn’t pay this controversy much attention, although I would probably side with the people who hated it. Looking at this guy I can’t help but feel he belongs more in a He-man cartoon than an Ultima. UO2 wasnt all cyborgs though and the other 3 figures of this size were along more traditional lines:-



The final two figures are larger than the other four and slightly more expensive. First off, it’s back to the technology/fantasy mix with Juggernaut. Part troll, part steam engine, part shopping trolley.

The final figure was the most expensive to get hold of costing me about the same as all the others put together (still not that much). It’s the largest and most traditional, being a fairly standard dragon although it does have transparent panels on the wings and a base to stand on all of which you won’t see in the picture here.

I’ve not actually taken any of these out of their packaging, so I can’t go into much detail about the figures themselves. They look well made, but nowhere near as detailed as on the box art which is one of the reasons why they are remaining sealed. They is still a reasonable amount of detail, especially the dragon, but I’m less than impressed with Captain Dasha who is looking very strangely proportioned and rather like she has been stuck together with body parts that don’t quite match up with each other.
It’s curious how little there is about the actual character on the box as you barely get more than the name. For instance Blackthorns description is power hungry tyranical lord, possibly accurate but I can’t help but feel that some of the subtleties from the Ultima 5 character have been lost somewhere along the way. Maybe they will all be characters in the 3 Ultima novels when I get around to reading them.

I’m not someone who holds much interest in action figures, these are purely part of the collection due to the Origin link. They have found a place on top of all my bookcases but aren’t especially decorative if I’m honest. I may well relent and take them out of the packaging at some point so that they are at least undecorative in less space, but for now I’ll leave them as they are. Picking these up got me wondering if there were any more Origin figures and I came across these two horrors on Ebay:-

Even the obsessive collector in me, can’t bring me to part with money and actually bid on these things. I’d like to hear if there were any other toys related to Origin games though. I’m not especially anxious to add any more to the collection in general, but there would be a definite appeal to a Crusader figure……

Day 226

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The second campaign is set in Iraq and instead of being based on a fictional conflict, is based on the Gulf War. This at first generates a bit more interest for me with the link to real life, although I have to say that the novelty wore off quite quickly. The more realistic nature of the missions made them less interesting to fly with huge distances to cover at times just to get between waypoints. There was possibly less interest to the missions themselves also, since Iraq doesn’t really have anything resembling defenses. You might come up against the occasional MIG but the fact is that the US had a ridiculous technological advantage in this war.

The terrain is marginally different in this campaign. It’s dead flat all the time for every mission but there are some new textures and buildings and the cities look good lit up at night. The missions themselves are mostly bombing runs similar to what went before, albeit with different targets such as power plants or even the presidential palace in a later mission. I don’t get to use the bunker busting guided bombs I had in the first campaign, although I understand that I might have had this chance if I’d not failed a few of the missions and consequently been assigned easier ones.

There were a couple of missions where I got called away from my objectives to support ground forces. These were the ones I struggled with, mainly as I don’t know my way around the navigation systems well enough. I should have put more effort into these but my patience for F-15 definitely ran out today. I quite enjoyed yesterdays first campaign but aside from the long periods of inaction in this campaign, I also ran into stability problems and they always occurred after I’d spent ages completing the mission and was on my way back. This started to wind me up after the first 3 or 4 times so I more or less dashed through the rest of the game as quickly as possible. It appears that you will win the campaign no matter what. Losing just changes the missions you fly to easier ones. This makes the campaigns extended tutorials which tailor themselves to your abilities.

After what felt to me like too many missions, I reach the end of the campaign and there is another brief cutscene…

Clearly this is a decent game but not one that I was ever likely to be a fan of myself. With this sort of game you get out what you put in, and I put in the bare minimum. Overall, I was more impressed with Longbow 2 than this but they are fairly similar products other than the aircraft they are simulating. It’s not exactly a high point to end on for me, as I really did have to force myself to play through the rest of this campaign once the crashes started happening. There haven’t been too many games like that in this blog, and often games I wasn’t looking forward to I actually enjoyed but this ultimately wasn’t one of them.

I’d rather not finish on a low point which leaves Noctropolis to raise the bar. I’m far from clear on how much involvement Origin had in it but it was definitely some, which makes it an Origin game in my eyes, at least for the purposes of this blog. Whether it’s any good or not is another matter but there is only one way I’m going to find out. I’ll be starting that later today with the aim of finishing it before Christmas.

Day 225

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I attempt to restart the F15 campaign where I left off. I soon realise that F-15’s campaign mode doesn’t allow you to go back and retry a mission. If you fail, then you have to live with it and it will change subsequent missions. I don’t realise this until I’ve failed most of the early missions but I press on regardless.

The commands to speed up time and skip to the next action point work reasonably well. The skip to waypoint option is a little strange in that it takes you to predetermined stages in the mission and it’s entirely possible that important things will happen on your way there which you don’t see. I.e. you can emerge in the middle of a load of fighters, or take damage. Alternatively you can still be way off the action. However, I’m never quite sure whether the next point will take me to the target or straight to the end of the mission and this is the reason for failing most of the early missions as I simply autopilot past my objectives. Never try to use this jump feature after the last waypoint by the way, as it hangs the game up permanently as far as I can tell.

Speeding up time allows for 2x, 4x and 8x options. This sounds good but the game keeps automatically lowering this making 8x almost impossible to use. It’s a little irritating but I can still speed things up considerably.

The biggest challenge in F-15 is finding my target as far as I can see. I’m never sure which waypoint to look at and the before mission map doesn’t work too well. In fact scrolling around it is so awkward that I give in on it and just hope that I see my targets at some point in the mission. Once I’ve flown a few and know what to expect this works reasonably. The missions I’ve flown have varied from blowing up attacking planes or helicopters to strikes on airfields or structures. They tend to involve flying in large groups which I lead. For a typical bombing run, I’d have my own wingmen then another pair of fighters with the same load-out. There would also be another 4 escort planes without bombs just there to keep us safe. The F-15 has quite limited ordnance and I’ll have just 2 of each type of air to air missile as a rule with a slightly larger bomb load-out. The gun is extremely limited in ammo also and not something I make much use of. With such restricited firepower, it’s very much a game where you are part of a team and you certainly aren’t crucial to the missions success in the same way as a Wing Commander game. If you can get your wing to the target and order them to attack, then you will usually beat the mission.

The most significant mission we fly involves striking bunkers containing the Iranian leaders. After this I appear to have to go back and re-fly the same missions that I failed at the start of the game striking airfields. I’m guessing that the mission structure is somewhat interactive here but I don’t know to what extent. Maybe if I hadn’t failed those missions, the campaign would have ended after blowing up the leaders. After 20 missions, the Iranians capitulate and we win the campaign.

There is another brief cutscene which doesn’t add anything in particular and then a bit more text. It’s not much of a reward for beating the campaign but I’m surprised that I actually managed to beat it at all. I must have failed at least 7 or 8 of the 20 missions while I was figuring out what I was doing so it is extremely forgiving to let me win still.

The campaign mode in this game doesn’t actually allow the cheating that you could use in Longbow (i.e. unlimited ammo and/or invulnerability) so I was expecting to seriously struggle with this and not to finish in something like 90 minutes on the first attempt. I don’t have any real criticisms about this though. The challenge in this game will come from flying the plane itself. I could tweak the realism options to make life slightly harder and go and play it again and each time I’d learn a bit more. That’s assuming that I want to learn how to fly an F-15, which I don’t especially.

I’ve still enjoyed playing this though and have found it a little more accessible that Longbow. I think a large part of that is just that I’m more used to flying planes than helicopters and it comes a lot more naturally. My time on Strike Commander stood me in good stead and with a smoother engine things were a little easier here if anything. The other reason is the relative lack of firepower, compared to an Apache and the automated nature of it. I’m not having to worry about aiming unguided rockets and the like and I rarely get close enough to a target to even see it in this game. In this sense the combat is quite simple, with the real excitement coming on bombing runs on airfields.

That’s one campaign down with one to go anyway. After getting through this one so quickly, I’ll attempt to play through the next in a single sitting as well. I have a feeling it might be a bit trickier.

Day 224 – F-15

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It’s been a long time coming but it’s time to get started on Jane’s F-15. Apart from Ultima Online games, this was one of the final games published by Origin before their swan-song with Ultima 9.

It was published in 1998 by Origin Skunkworks. This team would eventually split off from Origin and go on to work on some more Jane’s games none of which I’m going to be playing in this blog. As you would expect it’s a flight simulator. There are no other planes included and it’s purely the F-15. I’ve said it before, but flight simulators are not my thing and I’m playing this game simply to make up the numbers. I’ll try to keep an open mind but I’m basically going to rush through it as quickly as possible as there are plenty of games after this that I’d rather play.

I thought the Longbow 2 manual was big when I played that game, but I hadn’t seen the one that comes with this. It’s so large they’ve used a metal coil to keep it together rather than binding the pages as in a normal book. On the bright side the game does come with a much smaller second manual containing the essentials to get started. I glance at this but basically just jump straight into the training missions of which there are plenty.

These lessons are brief and each designed to teach a single thing. I.e. taking off, shooting a ground target with a gun, etc… I start out simple with taking off and flying through some waypoints. It takes me a while to realise that my waypoint is shown with a tiny rectangle on the HUD but the casual flight model is very forgiving so the actual flying part is simple.

While I’m out here, I take the opportunity to fly near some buildings on the ground. The mission is in Bahrain so there are oil wells around and lots of sand. The graphics are reasonable without being anything too impressive. I’m on my Windows 98 PC with the 3dfx graphics card again for this one and old as that machine is, the game runs perfectly smoothly with everything on maximum. Origin didn’t release many games in this period but it seems as though all of them were primarily 3dfx glide games. F-15 doesn’t offer Direct3D support at all out of the box, but there was a patch released later. At the time this was being developed 3dfx were dominant and Direct3D was still an immature technology so it’s no surprise that developers would choose to support Glide in preference. Direct3D only really became useful once the competition in the graphics card market started increasing and you could no longer afford to limit yourself to one set of customers.

On one of the missions, I have to fly down the side of a mountain range to hide from enemy placements. There is some terrible texture creeping on this map. It appears like a massive earthquake is occurring in front of me as I fly along. I’ve only seen this occur on the one mission but it’s not good when I’m more or less using the recommended hardware. Maybe it wouldn’t happen on a voodoo 2, but it’s certainly not something I’d like to see too much.

Other training missions prove to be even simpler than this first one. Learning to shoot an in air target with the gun for instance. You start in the air directly behind the target, line it up and fire. The mission takes 10 seconds. There are also identical missions except for using the two air to air missiles you have on the F-15. The medium range missile locks on from 18 miles away so I never even see the plane I’ve shot down. All the systems in the plane are very familiar and anyone who has played Strike Commander will feel at home here as there is very little difference.

By far the hardest of the missions is the air refuelling one. This is so tricky that they included an automatic option which I gladly take after getting nowhere doing it the hard way. After this there are a couple of missions to show how the tracking systems work, and another couple on ordering your wingmen around.

These training missions more or less do their job but are poor compared to Longbow 2’s. They didn’t have any speech and only some had brief text instructions at the top of the screen. They also missed things out and really did only cover the basics. Having said that, I wasn’t bombarded with technical details like in Longbow 2 so this did at least teach me what I actually needed to know.

With the training missions out of the way, I decide to start one of the two campaigns. There is a not so varied choice of either Iran or Iraq. I go for Iran. The back story is told out with reams of text. Basically, Iran is trying to invade it’s neighbours and take over oil production and we have to stop them.

There is a brief cutscene of the usual stock footage with rock music played over the top of it which doesn’t serve any particular purpose….

Then it’s more text again to introduce the first mission. The interactive battlefield mode from Longbow 2 doesn’t appear to be present here and instead its back to the set mission structure. This gives more scope for a plot to the game so this is fine by me as someone who is going to play the game once and never again. It will reduce replay value however for anyone else.

In the first mission, I have to intercept strikes by the Iranian air force on oil fields. This involves flying along a lengthy route looking for them. This first mission immediately highlights my problem with this sort of game in that I’m flying for about half an hour and nothing happens. I mess around with the controls for a bit and find a nifty virtual cockpit mode as shown in the screenshot but thats about as exciting as it gets. Eventually, I give in and go back to read the reference card. This is split over 8 pages, and apparently only covers the basic controls and you have to read the manual for the rest….. This is my other problem with flight sims. I find options to skip to the next waypoint and also to compress time though which should make the game far more fun next time I try it. I leave it here for now and will see if I can’t get a few missions done tonight.