Copying Multiple Disks to One CD

[discobobdude]

Hello everyone, i figured this would be a good place to ask, because many of you have the Sierra games and may have already done this.

recently i thought i should back up all my old sierra games as some of the discs are old and im worried that they will wear-out sometime soon.

basically, what im wondering, is there anyway to take the 5 discs that i have and copy them to a cd...

in other words what i want to do is make the install file not ask me to "insert disc 3 of 180" you know what i mean?

this is all for personal use and i dont plan on distributing my backups, but i thought it might be a good idea because i have lost some games because of the age of the discs.

thanks a bunch.

[Zemus]

Well, it's simple enough to try out. Copy all the floppies into one folder on your HD and see if the installation program works correctly.

[HondaSiR]

basically, what im wondering, is there anyway to take the 5 discs that i have and copy them to a cd.

What kind of disks do you want to backup? Floppy disks? If so, then I see no reason why you should have any problems doing so. Arrange them accordingly on your hard disk then copy/burn them onto a CD. If you copy them back to your hard disk later (in case you accidentally erase your HD), they should work as though they never left your computer.

[discobobdude]

would i have to take the files and then copy them back to other floppy's or should the program be smart enough to see it has all the files it needs?

[HondaSiR]

I don't think you have to copy them back to the floppies if you have them all in your HD. But to remove any doubt, why don't you follow Zemus' advice earlier? Copy all the files from the floppies to your HD, then installing them there (remove all floppy disks from the drive). If the install program prompts you to insert a disk, just press "enter". That should do it.

[Zemus]

Sierra's floppy-based games don't need any fancy path-thing set up in the config-file, so you don't even need the installation program. You can just copy the game from floppies or a CD-ROM with Windows or DOS and just run Install to set up your soundcards.

[Marten]

Provided that you aren't trying to back up some of Sierra's oldest games (ones where you had to boot the floppy), you shouldn't have any problem putting the disks on CD.  The only thing you'll need to look out for is the copy protection, but it should be easy enough to track down copy protection "cracks" for all of the games.  If you have an old AT or XT based system, and can boot up the games on that, then you can use the old sierra "unprot" utility (which was designed to confirm you had a working legal floppy before letting you unprotect the game - but it only works on older floppy drives).

Once you get past the copy protection, sierra's games typically have files named like "vol.0", "vol.1", "vol.2" for the AGI games, and VOLUME.000, VOLUME.104, etc for SCI games.  Both types of games also have a master index file which helps the game to know "which disk holds which volumes."

All of the DOS-based games are smart enough to look for a volume on the current disk first, before looking in the index and then prompting for a disk.  That is why you don't get "insert disk 4 of 8" when you have one of their games installed to a hard drive.

Don't worry about multiple floppies holding the same-named file (usually vol.0 or volume.000) - that file is intentionally the same on all of the disks.  It contains data that Sierra felt was used frequently enough that you'd go batty if you had to change disks to access it every time it was needed.

[discobobdude]

thanks ever so Marten!

when you say

Don't worry about multiple floppies holding the same-named file (usually vol.0 or volume.000) - that file is intentionally the same on all of the disks. It contains data that Sierra felt was used frequently enough that you'd go batty if you had to change disks to access it every time it was needed.

that means if it mentions "do you wish to overwrite this file" i should just say yes? also where do i get this "unprot" utility you speak of? how do i bypass the copy protection (i assume your not talking about the kind of protection in which im asked a question needing a manual. i have most of those still)

if you can just clear up those few things that would be great! thanks again!

[Marten]

thanks ever so Marten!

when you say

Don't worry about multiple floppies holding the same-named file (usually vol.0 or volume.000) - that file is intentionally the same on all of the disks. It contains data that Sierra felt was used frequently enough that you'd go batty if you had to change disks to access it every time it was needed.

that means if it mentions "do you wish to overwrite this file" i should just say yes? also where do i get this "unprot" utility you speak of? how do i bypass the copy protection (i assume your not talking about the kind of protection in which im asked a question needing a manual. i have most of those still)

if you can just clear up those few things that would be great! thanks again!

Yes, don't worry about overwriting files - just say yes.

As for unprotecting or bypassing copy protection on AGI games (the 320x200 really blocky games, like the original King's Quest, or Gold Rush, or the Black Cauldron), see http://www.agidev.com/download/ for the utilities listed under "Copy protection".

SUP is by our good friend Anders Olsson, who you'll find sometimes visiting this message board  Hard to believe that he wrote SUP back in 1988, and it was featured on disk 1406 of the PC-SIG Library in 1989.  Anders has written a number of other nice utilities, including patches to provide multi-voice sound from a Sound Blaster (AGISB) or General MIDI device (AGIMIDI) that will make your PC sound like a Tandy or IBM PCJr when playing these old games.  (AGIMIDI can be fetched from http://www.queststudios.com/roland/utilities.html - look for "Sierra AGI MIDI Utility").