On Nov 24, 2004, at 9:30 am, Gavin Smith wrote:
Use gzip rather than zip, then SimCoupe can load them directly.
What does anyone else think about this?
I would say dsk.gz is never less convenient that dsk.zip, and in may
situations is completely transparent.
Well, SimCoupe's already got one format (sdf), but if you have plans
to
prefer different, more standardised one I think the archive needs to
be
using the latest format.
This is something I need some input on because I've used a real SAM
much more
than an emulator so am only really familiar with .dsks - I don't think
I've
ever used anything else! I'd like it to be as easy as possible to
transfer any
images to an actual SAM disk though.
Well obviously dsk is fine for anything which will go onto a standard
floppy with no weird formatting, but that's probably a minority of
commercial Sam software. Everything else will need a less convenient
format, the situation as I understand it (please somebody correct if
I'm wrong) is that:
- .dsk is a very simple format, it will describe only unprotected disks
but is well understood and there are many programs which can read/save
into this format.
- .dsk can be compressed as dsk.gz, which then can be used in almost as
many programs as the raw .dsk image.
- there is a format called .sad which can describe more formats that
.dsk, but doesn't cover all the bases.
- current versions of SimCoupe are able to read a format .sdf, this was
designed by Simon Owen for use in SimCoupe and can describe all Sam
disks. However there is no support for it outside of SimCoupe
- there are also various other standard floppy image formats which can
describe protected disks. There are standard utilities for transferring
them to and from real floppies, but SimCoupe doesn't offer direct
support for them yet (excpet .td0).
I would use dsk.gz wherever possible, but protected disks will need
something more complex. It then becomes a question of what is most
likely to last (.td0 is a closed format and the transfer utility only
works under DOS, so it probably isn't the way forward).
Andrew
--
--- Andrew Collier ----
---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ ---
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Have you lost your Marbles? http://www.marillion.com/
