How to produce your own compilations of FM-Towns games (V /06/17)

Transcription

1 How to produce your own compilations of FM-Towns games (V /06/17) Introduction You have one CD-ROM for each game, the whole collection takes too much room? Here is the solution. This article explains how to compile your own CD-ROM, full of games, taking the examples of the FM-Towns versions of The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2 : LeChuck s Revenge and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. You will learn how to copy files, how to produce your own menu, how to keep a TownsOS CD-ROM booting even if it has been modified or created with a ISO file editor, and finally you will know how to burn all this stuff to a blank CD-ROM, with the audio tracks! Warning! This is in no case a method for piracy! You can do what you want with FM-Towns games only if you OWN them. I myself bought some (only adventure games from LucasFilm / LucasArts) on e-bay. I found interesting to decipher how the whole thing works (didn t catch it all yet), and plan in the future to know a little more. So : don t contact me about illegal matters. You are warned. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 1 / 25

2 Table of contents How to produce your own compilations of FM-Towns games (V /06/16) 1 Introduction 1 Warning! 1 Table of contents 2 Structure of a TownsOS booting CD-ROM 3 It s a bird It s a plane No it s an ISO CD-ROM! 3 Boot Sequence 4 The FM-Files 7 What is needed in this article? 10 First Method to produce a booting ISO image file 11 The booting CD-ROM itself 11 Extracting the needed game files 13 Editing the needed files 14 Creating the final ISO image 14 Second Method to Produce your booting ISO image 16 Creating the IPL dump 16 Let s create the ISO file! 17 The boot sector (IPL) 20 Adding the audio tracks 21 Extracting the original audio tracks 21 Make a.cue file 23 Burn your CD-ROM! 24 The end 25 Nobody s perfect 25 Big thanks to : 25 Useful web links : 25 V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 2 / 25

3 Structure of a TownsOS booting CD-ROM It s a bird It s a plane No it s an ISO CD-ROM! The CD-ROM is in the good ol ISO 9660 format Here is an example : Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. You can see here that the CD-ROM structure complies with the basic type of ISO 9660 : no Joliet format, no UDF, ISO Level 1 This image is really interesting. You can see that the labels have been edited, giving out different informations. Sometimes, even the Copyright File is filled. No matter what you modify here, the CD-ROM will boot. Just don t leave a blank field for the Volume Label! V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 3 / 25

4 Boot Sequence This is what you see first when you power on the FM-Towns console. And now the splash screen of TownsOS Version 1.1 Level 30. This is the system we ll be studying. Just a word about the ROMs. The guys who wrote the program to dump the ROMs named them : FMT_DIC.ROM : DIC like dictionary? FMT_DOS.ROM : some DOS files here, seen later FMT_F20.ROM : contains the 20x20 fonts FMT_FNT.ROM : contains the regular fonts FMT_SYS.ROM : I think this the heart of the system BIOS (graphic, sound routines, ) File entries in the FMT_DOS ROM Looks like MSDOS.SYS for me V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 4 / 25

5 Here are the files you can encounter on your FM-Towns CD-ROM game, in order to be able to boot and get a beautiful menu. There are different versions of MS-DOS for FM-Towns : regular versions and the versions known as DOS/V, enabling to display Kanji characters. We can see here that it strangely reminds another system the MS-DOS structure! There are the system files (IO.SYS, TBIOS.SYS ) and even the AUTOEXEC.BAT / CONFIG.SYS duo. The file extensions are COM, EXE, BAT, BIN exactly as a booting MS-DOS 6 or Windows 98 boot file structure. There are.exp files, though. They always run by the means of an executable : run386.exe. It is a special way to launch programs in protected 32 bits mode, like CWSDPMI under MS-DOS for PC. In fact, only the following files are really required in order to boot : IO.SYS TBIOS.SYS TBIOS.BIN CONFIG.SYS AUTOEXEC.BAT RUN386.EXE The IPL sector of the CD-ROM is read. It contains, at address 20, the sector number where stands the first system file to be executed : IO.SYS. IO.SYS needs to be first in the file structure. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 5 / 25

6 Going to sector 0x15 (21 in decimal), we can find the content of IO.SYS. Then CONFIG.SYS is executed line by line (see the example on the right). It launches TBIOS. A reference to COMMAND.COM is present, but this file is not available on the CD-ROM! Strange? Indeed. SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /P DEVICE=TBIOS.SYS /TBIOS.BIN BUFFERS=8 FILES=20 Now it s bit tricky. It seems that some files in the ROM are decompressed or copied in RAM, using a virtual drive C: There are system files, utilities and drivers (MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM and MSCDEX.EXE for example). A driver for the CD-ROM drive is made permanent, mounting the Q: drive. It happens only if we boot from the CD-ROM drive. Next to be processed line by line : AUTOEXEC.BAT CONTROL.EXE is launched. If it fails, the CD-ROM drive R: is mounted (hard drive booting), then CONTROL.EXE is executed again. It runs the menu TMENU.EXP. This extract from CONTROL.EXE shows that TMENU.EXP is launched (it is the menu with the icons). T_OAK2.exe is maybe a CD-ROM driver. set comspec=c:\command.com :START CONTROL if errorlevel 1 GOTO OAK2ERR GOTO END :OAK2ERR DICUTY + * OAK2USR.DIC GOTO START :END Q:\DRIVE_R.IMG R:\RUN386.exe - Maxibuf 32 :\TMENU T_OAK2.exe The TMENU.EXP file is an executable that seems (HexEdited) to contain several parts : code and data (for example a mouse driver). It accesses several TMENU.XXX other files. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 6 / 25

7 The FM-Files In these examples, we re using my Monkey Island 1+2 compilation files. Let s see what the files are here for. We have already seen some of them, for example system files and drivers. TBIOS.BIN TBIOS.SYS DRIVE_R.IMG DICUTY.COM OAK2USR.DIC RUN386.EXE DOG.COM TMENU.IF2 TMENU.INF TMENU.ICN Provide the TownsOS functions like graphic and sound routines Not exactly sure. Seems to be transferred in the Sprite RAM. It is supposed to cache RUN386.EXE. Not exactly sure either. Seems that has to do with input and keyboard mapping. The 32 bits mode program launcher. A tiny utility, don t know what it is. I really don t know what it s here for! I ve been told it could contain file associations. Aaaahhhh Here is an interesting file! It contains the different entries available on the menu. There is the icon name and file name associated and interesting numbers. Oooohhhh Edit it with a hexadecimal viewer, it is obviously full of drawings. The extension : ICN. ICN, pictures Icons! Yep, this is it. It s a bit large, though. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 7 / 25

8 The only files we have to modify, for our purpose, are the menu-related ones. TMENU.INF Edit TMENU.INF with Hexedit. Each entry is obviously represented by 128 bytes. We have, in red, the file name to launch (in green too, but with the \ that indicates root ) In blue is the icon text. So we can guess that Monkey1 + M1K.BAT is there to launch the game Monkey Island 1 in Kanji (Japanese text). In yellow 5800 in hexadecimal? What could it mean? We ll see that later. q: cd \mk \run386 monkeyk There we have the content of the M1K.BAT It runs on the Q: drive the MONKEYK.EXP file. Q is the CD-ROM drive letter when booting for a CD-ROM drive. TMENU.ICN I show this example because the borders are delimited. I have drawn blue dots showing the pixel scale. It is an icon extracted from my compilation. We can see that it is a 32x32 pixels black and white icon. We can guess that the icons are defined with one bit per pixel. Black=0, White=1 (the entire interface is black and white). We could try to extract some data from the TMENU.ICN file, with (32x32 pixels) / 8 = 128 bytes V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 8 / 25

9 The file is really big! There are many zeros, so it s easy to find a candidate for iconization. Look here : 128 bytes, we are on the right track The result in binary notation, I have cut the rows to have 32 lines. There seems to be something showing The zeros and ones have been replaced by tiny squares. This is exactly what we were looking for : see this icon extracted from the menu. Remember the data in the yellow square? It was 5800 in this case, and 5900 for the next one, M1E.BAT. Look at the starting address of the data extracted before (on the left pane) : 5900, exactly like what was defined in TMENU.INF for the M1E.BAT item! So : the TMENU.INF contains entries for the files to launch, with an address pointing inside the TMENU.ICN file for the icon data. We can see now that we have all the informations to build our own icons menu, available when a CD- ROM boots. You just have to be more hexadecimal-compliant! I did not find it myself, but don t forget that the system icons are defined BEFORE the 4000 address, this is where you can alter them. You can add your own icons after 4000! V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 9 / 25

10 What is needed in this article? There are several tools to obtain, in order to burn a FM-Towns games compilation : A virtual CDROM drive, able to mount virtual CD-ROMs using images in ISO, BIN, CDD (etc) format. I like Alcohol 52% or 120%. You can use the trial version, simple CD-ROM images mounting it is not limited. An ISO image editor, capable of reallocating an existing file inside the image. I have tried several utilities, and my choice goes for Magic ISO, which is very complete. It can also read diskette images in varied formats. The trial version is limited to 300 MB image files, which will be enough for our purpose. In this article, version 4.9 build 0151 is used. A CD-ROM burning program. Nero Burning ROM is a good choice for what we have to do. The trial version is only limited in time. A cue-file maker from ISO images and audio tracks / audio files. The tiny tool Sega Cue Maker is very appropriate for this task. It is freeware. A hexadecimal editor. I like HexEdit, simple to use, efficient. It is also freeware. A diskette editor named EditDisk (the program is labelled DiskExplorer though), that is able to read the formats used by your emulator, or a real FM-Towns with a working diskette drive (it is a flaw in many consoles, the diskette drive is the first part to die). And of course, it is also free. A little program that reads the FM-Towns CD-ROM IPL track, and can write it back to an ISO image. It is called simply IPLR and IPL. A MS-DOS boot diskette for FM-Towns (virtual or real, depends if you have a real console or not) Skills : none unexplained here, just a little practice :) It is better, though, to know a little about binary and hexadecimal numbers, bytes, burning, etc. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 10 / 25

11 First Method to produce a booting ISO image file The booting CD-ROM itself This will be the base of our future CD-ROM compilation. Take a booting CD- ROM from a game, in this case I will use Zac McKracken. Launch Alcohol (52% or 120%). Select on the left menu Image Making Wizard. Select the CD-ROM drive in which you inserted your Zak CD- ROM, and leave the options as seen on the right. Click Next. Select where your image will be saved, and select the ISO Image format. Enter the file name, click Next. Click on Start, wait a little, the job is done! You can close Alcohol. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 11 / 25

12 Now, launch Magic ISO. Select File, Open, select your ISO image. You should have a similar view as shown on the right. Select the CD-ROM image root, then choose File, Properties. IMPORTANT : be sure to tick the only option available in the Optimize tab. We ll see later what it means for our task. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 12 / 25

13 Select all the files not listed on the right. Delete them. Select File, Save. Now you have a booting CD-ROM image! You can test it with your FM-Towns emulator. Extracting the needed game files Insert your game CD-ROM in your drive. With Magic ISO, click File, Open a CD/DVD driver, select your CD-ROM drive. Select the needed session (always Session 1 I think). Select all the files needed by the game you want to save. DO NOT SELECT the system files as seen above! Do a right-click on the file list, Extract them. Select the destination folder, click OK. Your files have been saved! Restart all the above actions for as many games you want. You could use your file explorer for this task, but I really don t know if the result is exactly the same You don t know what files to select? For my part, I select ALL the files, except the system files. In general, for a game, you have the.bat file that launches it. You can view it in Magic ISO : select the file, right-click, View. How to locate the right.bat file? Extract and open TMENU.INF with HexEdit. q: cd \me \run386 monkey In this example, we can see that it is the ME folder you have to save, with of course the MI1E.BAT file associated. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 13 / 25

14 Editing the needed files How to Produce your Own Compilations of FM-Towns Games Extract these system files in a directory : TMENU.INF, TMENU.ICN Edit TMENU.ICN with HexEdit. Find a position to save your custom icon data. Write it down. It is good to have designed your icons before, and computed the hexadecimal values. Don t forget that, in binary, the white dots are represented by zeros, and the black dots by ones. A good tip : you can PASTE data with HexEdit! Now edit TMENU.INF with HexEdit. Change the existing entries with the right.bat names, and the titles. Don t forget to associate the icon by editing the word value (2 bytes) you wrote down before. Rewrite exactly where the old file names stood. The other entries must be filled with the hexadecimal value 20. If, for any reason, you want to edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT or whatever system file you like, remember this : DO NOT MODIFY THE FILE SIZE. No less, no more. Creating the final ISO image Make a copy of your boot CD-ROM image. Launch Magic ISO. Open the ISO image file. Select the CD-ROM image root, choose File, Properties. IMPORTANT : be sure to tick the only option available in the Optimize tab. It means that in case of file updates, the same position will be allocated on the CD-ROM. It ensures that the system files will remain at the same location, and so keep the boot properties intact. It seems for example that IO.SYS should be first on the CD-ROM. IMPORTANT bis repetita : make sure ALL the files you update have the same size in bytes. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 14 / 25

15 Now select the location of your game files and modified system files in the lower pane. Add them to the ISO image file. You can see here that I selected the Monkey Island 1 and 2 files (English and Kanji versions), and also the Indiana Jones : Fate of Atlantis Demo. Don t forget to change the label properties, at least the compilation name. Then save your CD-ROM image. You can close Magic ISO. Is it done? Not quiet so! (on the right are shown the label properties of the original Monkey Island 2) V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 15 / 25

16 Second Method to Produce your booting ISO image A second method? I discovered it thanks to Charles Doty, who hinted the way to go. I adapted it, though. Creating the IPL dump We have to copy the file IPLR.COM on a working FM-Towns system, virtual or not. If you have a real FM-Towns, no problem : just copy the file on your MS-DOS boot diskette. If you are emulating (like me) this machine, it is a bit more tricky. Open DiskExplorer. Open your boot image file. Select the format You can see now the content of your diskette. Drag and drop from the.zip file (or from an explorer if you have decompressed the archive) the file IPLR.COM. Close DiskExplorer. Now boot your FM-Towns from your MS-DOS diskette (or your emulator from your diskette image). You have also to insert your original game CD-ROM in the drive - one which boots from the CD-ROM, remember! Make sure to verify the diskette tab to remove the writeprotection, or make sure your diskette in not virtually write-protected in your emulator. Type in : IPLR It s done! You should have a file called IPL.BIN, 2048 KB size. This operation dumps the first sector of the CD- ROM. You can type in DIR to check the file. Shut down your FM-Towns. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 16 / 25

17 Transfer the file IPL.BIN on your computer. If it is a diskette image, launch again DiskExplorer like seen above, open the same file, drag and drop IPL.BIN from the diskette to somewhere on your hard drive. If you want to have a look at this file, feel free to use HexEdit. Keep carefully this file, it will be the same for all the booting CD-ROMs you could produce Let s create the ISO file! Speaking of the files order, let s look into the boot diskette tracks. Launch HexEdit, open the diskette image. If you have a real diskette, you can make an image with DiskEdit (menu Extended, Create image from disk). Locate the FAT sector, and locate the IO.SYS entry. See the files order. We will reproduce it. We have to extract the game files. Insert your game CD-ROM in your drive. With MagicISO, click File, Open a CD/DVD driver, select your CD-ROM drive. Select the needed session (always Session 1). Select all the files needed by the game you want to save. DO NOT SELECT the system files as seen above! Do a right-click on the file list, Extract them. Select the destination folder, click OK. Your files have been saved! Restart all the above actions for as many games you want. You could use your file explorer for this task, but I really don t know if the results are exactly the same V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 17 / 25

18 You don t know what files to select? For my part, I select ALL the files, except the system files. In general, for a game, you have the.bat file that launches it. You can view it in Magic ISO : select the file, right-click, View. How to locate the right.bat file? Extract and open TMENU.INF with HexEdit. q: cd \me \run386 monkey In this example, we can see that it is the ME folder you have to save, with of course the MI1E.BAT file associated. Now, to produce the ISO file from which we will burn the compilation. It is a bit tricky, you have to carefully follow the instructions step by step. Launch Magic ISO. Select File, New, Data CD/DVD image. Select in the menu Files, Properties. In the Label tab, write whatever you want. You can follow what is found in a real game CD-ROM. Do not select Also use the ISO 9660 text for Joliet. On the ISO tab, select the options exactly as seen from the right image. Important : do not select Joliet, and make sure the ISO file will be in ISO Level 1 format. Now, on the Optimize tab, select the only option available. I don t know if it makes any difference, but it worked this way : it makes sure, if you add the same file again to the compilation, that its location on the CD-ROM will be the same. It is particularly the case for IO.SYS, which must come first if you remember what was told at the beginning of this article. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 18 / 25

19 WARNING : don t skip any step! Do exactly what is told here. The order is important. Drag and drop the files ONE BY ONE, in the following order, from a booting CD-ROM game to your compilation : IO.SYS CONFIG.SYS AUTOEXEC.BAT CONTROL.EXE DICUTY.COM RUN386.EXE TBIOS.BIN TBIOS.SYS (end of the necessary system files) You can now add all the other files you extracted / edited before : TMENU.* AUTOEXEC.BAT if you modified it (don t worry, the file was already allocated, remember the option set above careful with the file size!) The files and directories needed by the different games. You can see here that I selected the Monkey Island 1 and 2 files (English and Kanji versions), and also the Indiana Jones : Fate of Atlantis Demo. Save your image file. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 19 / 25

20 The boot sector (IPL) How to Produce your Own Compilations of FM-Towns Games It is a bit improper to talk about a boot sector. We have produced an ISO CD-ROM, not a booting media. Now is the time to make it bootable, in the FM- Towns way. Copy the IPL.COM utility, and IPL.BIN produced lately, on the same location where you saved the game compilation ISO image. Launch a DOS box. Go to the directory where your files are. Type in : IPL IPL.BIN NAME.BIN (where NAME is the ISO file name) The ISO file date has changed. Your ISO image has now a correct IPL track! The IPL utility finds the IO.SYS location and writes it to the 0x20 position of the IPL track (first track of the CD-ROM). We can see in this example that the address is 44 (decimal). If you have Alcohol and a FM-Towns emulator (UNZ), you can already try your new CD-ROM. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 20 / 25

21 Adding the audio tracks I took the example of Monkey Island 1 and 2 to show we can do more! Monkey Island 1 uses audio tracks for the background music during the game. Monkey Island 2 uses MIDI tracks instead. If you burned the ISO image immediately, you can play Monkey Island 1 without music. But it misses something, you can t even look at the nice introduction So let s see how to extract the audio tracks of the original Monkey Island 1 CD-ROM, and re-inject them to our own compilation. Extracting the original audio tracks Insert your original Monkey Island 1 CD-ROM. Launch Nero Burning ROM. In the menu, choose Extras, Save tracks You will be asked to choose the CD-ROM from which the audio tracks will be extracted. First, select all the tracks form the Track list, except for the first one (it is data, not audio!) Next, if your CD-Rom drive permits it, choose to extract the tracks in the Digital manner (Output way), which is always better. After this, choose the folder where your files will be saved. Click the Options button. You don t have to do Jitter correction, so don t tick it (you own a real FM-Towns CD, don t you?) Remove Silence : this function removes the leading and ending silences. DON T CHOOSE IT : you want to keep the audio tracks as genuine as possible, out of sync audio for some games instead (speech). Now choose the Output file format - IMPORTANT : always prefer non-destructive audio formats for the resulting files. I always choose WAV. V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 21 / 25

22 By clicking Settings next to Output file format, you are able to modify the quality of the audio files. Since we talk about audio tracks from a CD-ROM, the choice is limited to one : 44100, 16 bits, Stereo. Exactly the audio tracks format from an audio CD-ROM. Now for the File name creation method : click on the User defined down arrow. Choose User defined, and enter in the field below : Track %N.%E. This will ensure that the files will be named Track 01.wav, Track 02.wav, etc. It is important to have 2 digits for the tracks numbers : many FM-Towns games have more than 9 audio tracks! Now click on the Go button. Watch the progression. You now have a nice collection of WAV files! Did you notice? The file order starts at 02. The DATA part of the CD-ROM was Track 01, remember V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 22 / 25

23 Make a.cue file The.CUE file is a way to describe a CD-ROM structure, especially with multi tracks ones. Launch Sega Cue Maker. Select the folder where your ISO image and the WAV files stand. Click Generate, then Save Cue. Enter a file name and you re done! IMPORTANT : you did not have before to use a ISO file (extension : ISO IPL uses it though). In the previous examples, I myself used the BIN format. It doesn t matter, here is how to fool Sega Cue Maker : Before launching the tool, rename your CD-ROM image extension to ISO. Do as told above, save your.cue file, then exit and rename your CD-ROM image again, back to the old extension. Then open the.cue file with a text editor and change the file extension of your image file from ISO to whatever was before. IMPORTANT bis : make sure you ONLY have the ISO file and the WAV files in your folder before launching Sega Cue Maker, it would be a mess instead! You wouldn t like to have TWO data tracks (for example), would you? V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 23 / 25

24 Burn your CD-ROM! You can try your new CD-ROM virtually with Alcohol, before really burning it (choose the.cue file, not the binary : you wouldn t have the audio tracks). Now is the final step! Run Nero, do File, Open. Choose the.cue file you made. A dialog box appears. Be sure to have the Write method set to Disc at Once. Finetune the other parameters for your CD- ROM burner. You can go now to the Info tab to verify the tracks list : there must be a data track (first), and then the audio tracks. You can now click Burn. Wait patiently while your CD-ROM is written. Now you ve done it! You can try your new CD-ROM with your FM-Towns console or emulator (I use UNZ, I don t own a real console) V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 24 / 25

25 The end Nobody s perfect If you found this article interesting (write me if you did!), or want to correct my English (which is not perfect, not my native language), or want to clarify technical matters (it will increase the version number of this document), feel free to drop a mail at this address : Parazythum@gmail.com Truly yours, Parazythum, The Big Bad Bug! Big thanks to : Ben from FMV Charles DOTY, creator of Frog Feast and many more things for different systems like NEO- GEO, Sega CD, Jaguar, FM-towns, etc, who was kind enough to answer many questions. the authors of UNZ for the FM-Towns emulator the LucasFilm and LucasArts authors for their wonderful adventure games! Useful web links : Alcohol 52% or 120% : Magic ISO : Nero Burning ROM : Sega Cue Maker : HexEdit : impossible to find out where I found it. Try a little Google search! EditDisk or DiskExplorer : MS-DOS boot diskette (JCEC site) : IPLR.COM & IPL.COM : UNZ, the nice FM-Towns emulator : ScummVM the LucasFilms and LucasArts games emulator, enables you to play from the data files, even from FM-Towns versions of your favourite adventure games : It s getting better all the time! (reminds me a Beatles song) Japanese Computer Emulation Centre (JCEC), nice page with tools for FM-Towns : Charles DOTY s thingies : and (Frog Feast + a blog) FMV, you are already here! BabelFish, with which you can translate from Japanese to English language (and many more) : - I don t speak Japanese!!! Sometimes it s really funny, the translation is weird (eg : CD-ROM lighting software instead of burning software ). V2.0 by Parazythum /06/17 Page 25 / 25