Edwin Blink wrote: > Interesting Format. But when going through all the trouble of > changing to a new disk image format (converting to FDI) its > still pretty limited.
There's no conversion needed, as existing SAM software can remain as DSK images. FDI images are only needed for non-standard disks that can't be represented in DSK format (they can also be used for general-use stuff too). FDI is still limited when you look at some of the heavier floppy controller tricks you can do, but it's enough for 99% of SAM disks I've seen. It's also a straight-swap replacement with SDF too, so just taking over that existing area rather than being introduced for a new purpose. > I think diskimages should only contain a relevant data for minimum > requirements and everything else optional Teledisk actually does it well, flagging rather than storing empty sectors - it's just a shame most other formats don't do the same. With FDI you can still have very small images by only storing the sectors used by the files on the disk, with blank tracks requiring only the 7-byte header. At a quick guess, a fairly extreme 5 track single sided disk would use: 14 + 5*(7 + 10*(7+512)) bytes, which is about 25K. > Maybe something to add for my B-Link Project the extra > disk/sector info could be used to easely detect bad sectors in images. Do you support transferring only the used sectors of disks, in the case where it's a SAMDOS-compatible format? It makes a big difference to the new SamDisk when transferring near-empty disks, and would be even bigger for your comms transfers! Si
