On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 09:20, Gavin Smith wrote: > Quoting Andrew Collier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > - 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 > > An important consideration for the archive is to make sure it's easy for > owners > of actual SAM hardware, to get the stuff onto a disk as easy as possible. I > did > a (very) quick Google and I can't see any tools to do this. Well, with access to a PC it's easy enough to copy a .dsk or .dsk.gz onto a standard floppy disk using, for example, Edwin Blink's Diskimage manager from http://home.wanadoo.nl/edwin.blink/samcoupe/software/diskmanager/diskmanager.htm (this page, oddly, has the title "SAM Coupe Screen Viewer"...) For protected disks, I think the main advantage of using a standard disk image format over sdf would be the existance of other tools to do the disk transfers. NB. For an archive of original software, if the original disk was protected I think it is historially more important to maintain the same protected format disk, than to hack it onto a standard disk image even if that may be more convenient. > If we do a CD, then > it would be a nice to be able to easily move the stuff directly from the CD > onto a CF or HD without any intervention from a PC. Interesting idea -- I guess this boils down to two problems, a) how to get the Sam to read the image files, and b) how to get the Sam to transfer a given image file onto a real floppy disk (or other media). a. I don't have an IDE interface so I don't know exactly what the SAM will be able to read. Is there software to make it understand an ISO filesystem? (Certainly I think that a CD dump of the site needs to be viewable by PC/Mac systems, so a Sam-specific filesystem probably isn't going to be great) b. There probably isn't the software to do this, yet, but it would be possible to write. Given an image file available from CD or whatever: dsk is a very simple format and should be very easy to write to a floppy. dsk.gz would involve someone poting gunzip to the Sam. I'm not aware of anybody having done this already - it might, just might, be possible to use the Sam C compiler to achieve this relatively automatically. I don't know about the internals of the formats which can describle protected disks. I suspect they're quite complicated, and probably compressed. Likely to be even more difficult to write to floppy disk than dsk.gz, and would be impossible to write them to CF or HD in any meaningful way (they would probably be the wrong size of the record, and any software which relied on the protected format would only know how to read it from floppy. Trying to run from CF or HD just wouldn't work at all). How many people are likely to want to do this? Who have CD drives on their Sam, but no PC? Andrew -- --- Andrew Collier ---- ---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ --- -- r<2+ T<4* cSEL dMS hEn/CB<BL A4 S+*<++ C$++L/mP W- a-- Vh+seT+ (Cantab) 1.1.4
