Date : Wed, 23 May 2001 06:10:31 -0700 (PDT)
From : Thomas Harte <T.Harte@...>
Subject: Re: Tape reading/writing
> > The UEF format is knocking on a year old, and at least two large
> > repositories of UEF files exist online
>
> And noone seemed interested for years before that
At that time no-one had a properly implemented Electron emulator[*]. And, in
terms of commercial support at and near the peak of popularity, the Electron
was primarily tape based machine, unlike the BBC with its 'money no object'
owners and their disc drives. Why should the majority of the old Electron
users (i.e. those without disc drives) have to be tutored in how to use the
ADFS (or worse - the even lesser supported and horrid DFS) and how to crack
games just to play them under emulation?
My point is just that a good tape format was not taken up or standardised by
the BBC mainstream, but that I required one and that 900+ images now exist
in it. Including some that could not be INF'd. Actually creating files that
can't be INF'd is now trivial thanks to full UEF write support in the next
version of ElectrEm - all it takes is some arbitrary register poking.
> Btw, the diskimages in the formats used for the BBC are also not good
> enough for proper emulation, as they do not store the head number for
> example (stored on sector headers), and other information (and what
> about format changes after a given track? I don't know what's possible
> in BBC disk protection despite being co-author of FDC),
[...]
> In case of tapes, it's not too hard to actually implement a
> method to use weird files, but for disk... Anyone up for this? It's
> probably best do make a BBC side program that handles this
What I do know from a small time doing odds and ends with a small firm is
that disc duplication machines seem to manage exact duplication without any
knowledge of the disc format. As do several Amiga programs. And some older
DOS ones, though I don't recall their names, and none of them work on new
PCs due to the usual FDC/BIOS reasons. So there is clearly a workable
solution.
-Thomas
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