Hydro Thunder HDD Image

1999 · operating-system · Arcade · Midway

Hard drive disk image for Hydro Thunder with software version 1.01b installed. Some info about this as the structure of the data is non-intuitive: - The hard drive comes formatted in three partitions which I have seen be different sizes seemingly from the factory - The third partition does not contain any files BUT does contain data and should not be discarded, see Note 1. - Writing the image to a larger drive that the machine can still use will appear to clear settings and high scores, but they are most likely still intact, see Note 1. - "end.zip" contains a different truncated disk image of the hidden data on a drive with factory default settings, see Note 1. - "AUD_2_00.TXT" is an example of exported audit data that is saved to a floppy disk by the game from the operator menu. Note 1: Operator settings for the game, high scores, and audit data are stored at the end of the hard drive by the game using raw writes. The data falls within the third partition on a factory drive setup but is not added as a file. Drive images that only contain files will miss this data. If it is missing the game will load factory defaults on boot and write those to the drive going forward. If you write a full drive image to a larger drive, the game will still write data directly to the drive but it will fall outside of the third partition. Any existing data will also not be where the game would expect and is ignored. If you using disk imaging tools to copy or move the actual raw data to the end of the drive space the machine can find it and use it. I am currently working on a tool for exporting/importing high scores from this data, but it has an integrity check that causes the machine to reset to factory defaults when changes are made. More research to pass that test is needed.