I have some very old floppies that may contain some interesting betas. However, most of them have been formatted directly on the Multi-Game Doctor 2 unit. There was a utility that allowed 12mb games (normally you could only fit 8mb) on a single floppy. Since disks were expensive back then, you could cram several 2,4 or an 8/4mb games on these disks. The problem is, these disks appear blank to the windows operating system. We may be SOL if this is some proprietary format. MR
Or there's Kryoflux, which is a PCB controller that connects to the floppy drive: http://www.kryoflux.com/ Whatever you use, make sure the write protect switch on the disks is set so you don't write/erase them by accident while trying to read out the contents. What kind of features does the MGD2 have when it works with disks? There could be another possible option. Try to load the disks into MDG2 memory, then insert a single blank regular 1.44 formatted disk. Next, try to copy the contents of MGD2 memory back to the new disk. With any luck, it will copy the first 8 megabit and then prompt for a second blank 1.44 formatted disk to continue writing the remaining 4 megabit.
Windows doesn't have a problem with 1600k formatted floppies. They're probably "blank" because they're "protected" ie have an intentionally malformed FAT, or they're just corrupted. You can still make a disk image with any tool that knows 1600k geometry, there's no need for low level recovery. Anyways it's very unlikely you'll find new dumps on MGD2 disks unless you dumped extremely rare carts yourself, typically disks just contain MGD2/GDSF "catalog" images, all of which propagated through the western BBS scene, made their way around the internet and were included in GoodSNES and subsequent databases.
Yeah, good idea see if winimage will read them. Uploaded them and us guys with mgd2 can try and read em?
I'm guessing these disks are bad. None of the suggested methods have worked. I'll try and load them direct from my MGDII and see if there is anything special and report back. And as the wise Calpis has stated, I'm guessing nothing rare just wanted to be thorough before I started tossing stuff.
Any luck? I have read about these formats and methods. I can't think of anything else other than using he drives that formatted the disks since the magic seems to be int the drive itself. I don't know of any software to read or write these disks on normal drives. I can't even get Windows 7 to properly recognize a floppy drive on a Pentium 4 based machine I have a 32 bit install of 7 Ultimate running on. LOL
Usb floppy? There's a super usb board made for reading floppies, it does data recovery quality reading. If I remember it's about $99 and primarily used by amiga / commodore users.
There are lots of "raw" disk reading things now, they work by timing the magnetic flux pulses from the read head then decoding them in software. But again, that's not necessary--the MGD2 uses a standard IBM disk controller so there's nothing a regular PC drive can't recover with a simple disk image tool.
I've got the same version of 7 recognizing my onboard floppy just fine. Also recognizes my USB SuperDisk drive however it won't read Superdisks only floppies. Could probably build one of those from scratch using the parts in my apartment.
