> > > - 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
Sorry, I worded that badly - I was referring to the sdf format. > 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. Yep, agreed, I said that in a previous post. > 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) I know of a few people with a CD drive connected - Wolfgang, you have this setup don't you? I haven't tried it, but from what I understand, it's possible to bung a CD containing .dsks into a drive connected to a SAM - it's then possible to write the .dsk to an Atom connected HD or CF card. I thought that was rather nice and I'd like to keep that going if possible. If possible, though, I'd like us to use one format and one method of compression. Would it therefore be easier to make everything .sdf in the first place and work on tools to work with these files? Gavin
