Using an FMT to create D77 disc images

Started by Cyothevile, February 23, 2022, 12:50:26 PM

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Cyothevile

Lately copy protection has been a thorn at my side.

I have dumped, rounding up about 190 FD. However I have had an issue with running protected games on my computers with floppy emulator.

Captainys has made the MAKED77.EXP program for FMT.

https://github.com/captainys/FM/tree/master/TOWNS/MAKED77/EXE

To use this program to make a copy of your disk, you should have an empty formatted FD in drive 1, and the protected game in drive 0. Make sure to have write protection enabled for disk you will copy.

MAKED77.EXP must be in the same directory as RUN386 which is the Phar Lap DOS extender.

Boot the FMT from a TownsOS disc and click the "command" icon in the Q drive directory. You should now be in DOS prompt.

Q:\RUN386 -nocrt B:\MAKED77.EXP A: 1232KB -out R:\output.d77

Q drive is your CD with DOS extender, B is the directory where the MAKED77 file is located (it can be also on HDD ). A is your input floppy drive (drive where copy protected disk is in my case) and R is the drive mapped out for empty floppy/formatted floppy. You can also output the file to a directory on your hard drive.

Remember DOS extender must be in same directory as MAKED77.EXP. In my example it would be better if it was installed to HDD. I just use different drive letters to explain.


You now have a D77 file that contains your copy.

Now the interesting part is that when performing a flux dump of a disc that contains that D77 file the protection is not visible in HXC app. However when viewing the D77 file itself the protection is visible. So I converted the D77 file to HFE, wrote to floppy with greaseweazle and it ran with no trouble.


This is a very good way to make a copy of your disks. I found the application helpful for protected FMT stuff I can't run on a floppy emulator. There isn't a lot of stuff with protection on FMT other than about 15 or so floppy.