Stuart Brady wrote:
You're absolutely right. Also, I doubt that much of the software in
GoodSAMC has been verified to see if the dumps are actually good!
(IIRC, disks use a 16-bit CCITT checksum, which isn't brilliant.)
You had better believe it - I took a fair amount of the stuff from NVG
that couldn't be unpacked or was borked from GoodSAMC and the amount of
disks with no DOS, no autos or just plain broken were astonishing.
Every single disk of the NVG conversion was checked to make sure that it
booted (where appropriate), loaded and did stuff, this kind of attention
seems not been given to GoodSAMC.
My current project is taking the usable, non-warez bits of GoodSAMC and
incorporating them into the tree for samcoupe.org, which, unsuprisingly,
is the same structure as NVG. This one may take a bit of time to
complete though as I've not got the full 789 GoodSAMC files yet which I
want before I start extracting them into the tree.
GoodSAMC is for "ROMS" collectors as far as I am concerned and is
heaving full of copyright material ripped and packed so not much use
when we want the archive to be images of the actual discs we aim to preseve.
And as for archiving software, I would vote for a file-based format, like
TAP or something silimar.
I agree. I think TAP might be fine as-is (but I expect that a lot of
Speccy related software won't like SAM header blocks.)
The only problem is that most of the stuff on discs was only ever in
that format and sequential format like TAP is kind of no-sensical - what
happens when you want to write the high score table back to disc? Update
a file?
We already have a file-based archive format - it's Rumsoft's ARCHIV (aka
PAK) although as are documented on the list my experience with some of
the files from NVG have been less than joyous, I read somewhere about a
problem with the file header contents changing (can't find it now,
curses) causing bad CRC errors in PAK files so maybe these problems are
sumountable.
Another thing, 90% of NVG was already in "whole disc" format which has
always been the preferred method for storage, especially since SimCoupe
and having all the files in one image is no great hardship when you can
just copy them over from one DSK to another in SimCoupe or Edwin's Disk
manager.
Dan.
