Gloating!  Writing and running 64DD disks with a 64drive.
Channel: Zoinkity
Date: 07/10/2015

Bit long and boring.  
Just showing off the capabilities of a disk writing tool for 64drives.  It can write data onto disks, and more importantly can write retail disks to dev disks despite the difference in disk formatting.

Note you can only write to a dev 64DD, not a retail one!  There's hardware limitations that haven't been worked around yet.

First is shown a pure dev disk that doesn't use the IPL.  
Second is SM64DD, a retail disk that also doesn't use the IPL.  The library in it is incomplete, probably from when they were still developing it.
Third is my original disk image, a small demo from the SDK, to show how much faster it is to upload data when you know where it should go and how large it is.
Fourth is a retail disk image.

If you have a splitter you'd be willing to part with I'm definitely in the market for one.  Right now I'm hacking disks to look for the IPL at a different address range, and so far all but the Communication Kit is willing to oblige.

Although it's optional I have it reformatting the disks each run.  That's basically a matter of copying LBA -20; writing the format, disk type, boot address, and country code into the copy; copying this to the four system regions; then blanking LBA -12.  DiskID gets written along with the data.  It uses sizes and LBA targets, not unlike Partner64.

When dumping a disk it is recommended you also keep the log file with it.  Unrecovered read errors are the result of LBAs that were not written to since the last reformat.  This acts as a map of where data belongs, allowing you to write it back much faster and analyze the disk easier.  Even the commerical disk writers used LBA lists and only wrote used data to given locations, and that's why even retail disks throw these errors.