Italian IBM PS/1 Famipack sets (not working)

In the meanwhile two sets of Ibm PS/1 famipack disks have resurfaced in my old parents house.
I used them during my elementary school days, so I had zero skills and interest in keeping 'em write protected and immaculate back then, so they have seen better days (they probably lost some crucial files) but I dumped them nonetheless... These are three+two disks with games and utilities, however the installers check for PS/1 bios, some specific disk partition or something even weirder.

I'm pretty sure it's the same custom ibm installer with proprietary .cm compressed foolishness I commented about in the ADI topic, so you cannot just play all the games directly from the disks.

I tested them in Dosbox and IBMulator and the installations spit out two slightly different nag screen errors, so this pack cannot be of much use without a cr@ck!

Soooo... here are the floppy images.

"Fami1a" includes Famistart, Famitap, Bushbuck and World Class Chess: Famistart (ps-start.exe) is the first collection installer.
"Fami2a" includes Pc Globe.
"Fami3a" includes Collins Online.
"pocA" includes second set installer and Ports of call.
"pcgA" includes second set's Pc Globe.

 

@myloch, big thanks to expert ripsaw8080 - he made a fix for these installers. As they require IBM PC-DOS only, the workaround is to make the installer to recognize MS-DOS (just launch FAMIFIX before running the installers).
But you still have to use an emulator with a DOS@HDD present, like DOS@DOSBox, PCem etc. I tried DOS@VirtualPC - at least some games install and launch fine!

 

That's because I'm using old machine with freedos bootdisk maybe?

 

@myloch, as I said, you have to have a machine with the actual DOS installed on a hard drive. A bootdisk is not enough!

 

Do you think the crack works with microsoft dos only or with anything dos based clone too?

Too lazy to install Dos now, any "pre-installed msdos hdd image to boot with dosbox" anyone?

***edit***
ok, I managed to obtain proper hard disk image (vdi) of pre-installed msdos 6.22 + win3.1 (thanx to Lw guys), I converted it to raw and booted with dosbox-x
I works flawlessly except for Famitap (it needs special fix by Peterferrie) and Collins Online (it loads without errors after installing it, but I don't remember how to use it).

Funfact: even if both sets of disks were made for the italian market, for some odd reason the pcglobe in the triplet of floppies is in english, while the one bundled with ports of call is in italian.

 

I don't know, I never tried anything besides usual MS- or PC-DOS.

Oh, you can use any of our PCem machines: PCem
Just launch DOS inside Windows 95 or 98, and then the fix. I did not make an Italian version of such a machine unfortunately, but the French one works, for example (if you know its keyboard layout, that is).

Yes, I've also checked all those. "FamiTap", "Collins" and both "PC Globe 4.0" are not games - but "Bushbuck", "World Class Chess" and "Ports of Call 1.2" are quite rare Italian versions!
And as an alternative to Peter's fix, you can also crack "FamiTap" as suggested by ripsaw8080: in FAMITAP.EXE modify the byte at offset 41FB from 3E to 26 to remove the BIOS restriction.

 

This *partial* binary dump doesn't deserve a new topic: it's another ancient collection for an old line of IBM personal computers. I only have 4 disks though, I got them on an online market for a risible price but they resulted in a really bad shape (2 of them had read errors, I managed to fix one of them while the other is completely fuqed). It's the third time this happens to me, IBM Italy used some REALLY BAD 1.44MB diskettes back in the nineties...complete binder failure!

MEGA

You can find a full rip of this in LW.

@Uka: You might ask ripsaw to cr@ck this too? xTAP
Variant of Famitap, for spanish Olivetti machines.

 

Done: