Looking for specific 'Konami disk'

Champion (352)

22-01-2013, 14:39

Hi,
about 22 years ago I had a 720k disk that had 4 Konami games on it. F1-spirit and MOG where on there, and I believe Vampire Killer too and the fourth I don't remember at all. What I do remember is that it booted with a menu with a white background, you choose 1-4 and then the game loaded very fast, much faster than loading the same game from regular disk (yeah I know the original carts load even faster...).

Would anyone have any idea which disk or release that could've been?

By supmsx

Master (158)

22-01-2013, 17:32

It is not an original disk,it was surely made by someone who copied these games with a menu (anyone can do it)

By Rataplan

Champion (352)

22-01-2013, 17:49

Well that's true except that it had REAL fast diskloading. Ie when you sequentially copy a disk, it does about 2 tracks/second. This one was exceptionally faster. You could really hear the floppy drive change tracks much faster. And before you say 'everyone can move a diskdrives head', it actually loaded much, much faster than one would expect.

So I don't think it's just a 'home-brew' like anyone can cook, but more like it was released by some group.

By meits

Scribe (6571)

22-01-2013, 19:05

It has to load the same amount of data... Faster loading might be because of not using FAT (as sector based disks do)... I doubt anyone would bother doing that to those games though...

By msxtrd

Champion (276)

22-01-2013, 19:49

Hmm.... these might have been megaroms cracked to load form disk, by Martos. As far I remember some of these games did only load partially and then were executed. When you reached next stage in the game, the next piece of megarom would load into memory. I guess, less mapped ram was needed to run these megaroms than people did usually had at that time.

By jr

Champion (379)

23-01-2013, 07:12

Not answering the original question, sorry, but generally on this topic of a "fast disk". It's actually quite easy to make a floppy disk load "faster" when it contains large, unfragmented files and you just want to load those big files as fast as possible.

On a normal disk, all tracks have sectors in sequential order from zero to eight (or however many sectors you have per track). When loading a big file that spans over multiple tracks, the disk drive usually has to wait for an extra disk spin when changing from track to track. This is because after loading the last sector on a track the drive must move the drive head to the next track to continue reading the first sector there and that takes some time and during that time the disk has already rotated so much that the first sector is already past the head so the drive must wait for the disk to rotate almost a full round before it can access the first sector on the new track.

The sector ordering can be changed (the numbers are stored in each sector's OOB area on the disk) so that on subsequent tracks you have a different starting number for the sectors and thus eliminate the need to wait for extra disk spin on a track change when reading sequentially from track to track. For example, on track 0 you would have the normal sector numbering from 0 to 8, but on track 1 you would have sectors numbered like 3,4,5,6,7,8,0,1,2, track 2 would have 6,7,8,0,1,2,3,4,5 and so on. The exact optimal amount of the sector shift per track of course depends on the drive you're using, i.e. how long it takes for the drive to move the head from track to track but you could use some generic value like half of the number of sectors per track and get a generic speed up on all drives although not gaining the ultimate possible speedup.

The fun part is that all this requires no extra support from software accessing the disk because the sector numbers are processed transparently by the drive firmware. You only need special formatting software to generate this non-standard sector ordering on the tracks. I haven't checked if MSX disk drive controllers give you enough access to control the disk formatting on this level but it was certainly possible on a PC in the nineties (read: I did this a lot on my PC back then).

By jr

Champion (379)

23-01-2013, 07:22

..sorry, got the sector numbers messed up there in my exaple, that's what happens when you type too fast Anyway, I guess you get the idea here, i.e. not having sector 0 as the first sector on each track but instead shift the sector numbers on each track so that when the drive moves from track to track it always has a better chance of finding sector 0 on that new track faster.

By supmsx

Master (158)

23-01-2013, 09:20

As also some floppy disks are faster than others,example between Sony and Philips,I have both machines
On Philips it is faster to load but also think more risk error,I always got errors on Philips disk (too fast?),never
on a Sony
But the slowest seems to be the Turbo-R

By snout

Ascended (15187)

23-01-2013, 11:46

Another trick is to use a single sided disk when you only need 360k or less.

By Rataplan

Champion (352)

24-01-2013, 12:46

Which it all wasn't Thanks for the replies guys but it loaded much faster on the same machine as other disks and it definitely was a 720k disk. Couldn't read or start it on my 8235. Sure must have been some sort of sector-based loading. Actually I remeber it booted directly (from the bootsector?), it didn't run from basic.

Anyway I guess I'll have to continue searching for it. Not that I really need to have it but for some reason I am interested if that would run under emu's and how it loaded so damn fast. And by the way it loaded the whole game, disk could be removed and game could be finished without the disk being in. Might have required 256K ram, I am not sure though.

Thanks for the replies, I'll keep on searching.

By Manuel

Ascended (19676)

24-01-2013, 22:19

Well, it can't be faster than some limit. A floppy doesn't do much faster than about 17kB/s. So for a 256k game you need at least about 15 seconds to load...