modelrail.otenko Trains, computers, vintage, retro, model railways… the lot…

A-Train (III) – Taiwanese Big Box Edition

This showed up on eBay and I fought a hard negotiation to get my hands on it. It was actually a few years ago... and I've only just thought to open the box and check if the disks work! Actually, the same seller still has another copy of it, and a copy of the Construction Set on eBay... still for crazy prices.

The box is mildly grotty... and it gets worse on the inside. The floppies are white, with quite colourful labels. Very pretty, but they also contained a concerning amount of grime as I spun the disk in the insert.

Initial attempts to read the disks failed miserably. Rawwrite just threw random errors and attempts to clean the disks didn't work. I then googl'd for methods and everywhere just seemed to indicate isopropyl alcohol. Most also came with the warning to NOT insert the disk whilst it was still wet.

... I, of course, didn't bother to wait for the alcohol to dry... instead believing it might also help keep the drive heads clean. Things started to progress and read percentages were starting to get higher and higher, but Rawwrite wasn't fun as there was no mechanism to "retry on fail". That's where IMD came in...

I set the retry count to 200 and let it chugggg.... and chug it did! On the first attempt, it got to the end of the first disk, but, as you can see above, it still failed on 2 of 78 sectors. I thought this was the end, and so I put the disks back in the box and attempted to forget about it.

The next day, I had decided to try again and attempted to image the first disk again with IMD, using the same settings. Would you believe it just worked? No extra cleaning... nothing. It chugged a little and performed a few sector retries, but it got there!

I then proceeded to install the game after writing the first disk to a spare floppy. I'd stupidly only written one disk and started the install... realising that I'd have to use the 2nd and 3rd originals ... but it worked! They'd had a few issues when imaging, but somehow the continual reading must have cleaned them up.

Booting it up...

Everything in the installer felt very stock-standard and I'd therefore assumed the game would be stock A-Train (III) with a spattering of Mandarin (maybe Taiwanese Hokkien?)... but boy was I wrong. They've added two introduction movies and even copy protection!

Here's a shot of the copy protection screen...

And here's where they stored the password on each of the 104 pages!

Turns out the password is a tiny code down next to the page number.

I'll attempt to hack the code out of the EXE shortly. I did get bored and sent the first 10 numbers to Google Gemini... seeing if it could work out a pattern, but it had zero fkn chance. And finally, here are the disk images in IMD and IMG formats for anyone who wants to play at home.