Wizardry IV and V: how to make scenario diskettes?

[tomcw]

Before you can play, you need to make copies of the 6 (or 9 for Wiz-V!) scenario disks.

After booting, at the menu, select (M)ake, then 2) Disk Drives... but there appears to be a bug? (in the game) where if you didn't boot with a disk in the 2nd drive, then it never enables it (via $C0EB). EG. With drive-2 empty, put a Visual Studio conditional BP in Disk2InterfaceCard::Enable() after m_currDrive has been set... it only triggers once during boot.

During the (M)ake process, it even says "Formatting blank Diskette..." then "Writing to blank Diskette...", but again never enables drive-2.

Also if you boot with a blank.dsk (ie. type=DSK) (which is 140K of sectors with all 0x00's) then again it ignores this "blank" disk.

Workaround: put a blank.nib in the drive-2, then boot with that. Then use this as your blank disk for a copy of the master disk. And then either create a blank .DSK or .NIB images and make copies of the other master disks.

Alternative Workaround: just say you have 1 Disk Drive (but that's a lot of disk swapping!)

[tomcw]

During "Formatting blank Diskette..." it is erroneously accessing $C18B instead of $C0EC to read the data latch (and all other $C08n addresses):
E152:BD 8C C0 LDA $C08C,X ; C18B, X=FF

X is loaded with 0xFF from $FB at $E145.

And $FB is set to 0xFF earlier at $E39B.

[tomcw]

Actually it's a bug in AppleWin: @kerthunk asked:

Is it searching for a drive being connected? Several enable the drive and make sure that bits (or noise) flow in to know that a drive is connected. If the latch remains 00, then there is no drive connected.

Disk2InterfaceCard::ReadWrite() returns 0xFF when no disk is in the drive. I tried changing to rand() and now I can start with drive-2 empty, and insert a blank DSK during the "(M)ake" process, and it works.

[tomcw]

Wizardry V

BEA6: LDA $C089,X ; $C0E9: motor on
      LDX $FB     ; X = #$60
      LDA $C08E,X ; $C0EE: write=0...
      LDA $C08C,X ; $C0EC: and load=0 = readSequencing mode
      LDY $0C     ; Y= #$60 or #$61
      LDA $C08A,Y ; enable drive-1 or 2
      LDY #$0D    ; retry count = $D30
      STY $09
      LDY #$30
      STY $0A
BEBE:

Here's the inner-loop of the code to detect if a drive-2 is connected:

• Drive-1(or2) connected if 9 consecutive ($C0EC) != ($C0EC)

BEBE:A0 09             LDY #$09               
BEC0:BD 8C C0          LDA LCBANK1+1,X ;C0EC
BEC3:88                DEY                    
BEC4:F0 24             BEQ $BEEA ; success = drive connected
BEC6:48                PHA                    
BEC7:68                PLA                    
BEC8:48                PHA                    
BEC9:68                PLA                    
BECA:DD 8C C0          CMP LCBANK1+1,X ;C0EC
BECD:D0 F1             BNE $BEC0              
BECF:              DEC $0A
                   BNE BEBE
                   DEC $09
                   BNE BEBE
; timed out = no drive connected
BED7: LDA $C088,X ; $C0E8: motor off
      ...