Date : Mon, 30 Jul 2001 23:12:30 +0200
From : Isabel Cisternas & Robert Schmidt <rschmidt@...>
Subject: Re: Stealing a proper disc image format
Hello Thomas,
I might have just the thing for you: A friend of mine, Vincent Jougin,
has written a utility, Disk2FDI, supporting his own proprietary disk
image format, FDI, as well as ADF. FDI was created to
There are dozens of disk image formats and utilities, I hear you say,
but what Vincent has accomplished is singular in the world: Disk2FDI
was written *especially* to handle obscure, protected and exotic system
disk formats.
For example: The author of UAE (the Amiga emulator) said in public that
reading Amiga floppies on standard PC hardware is 100% *impossible*
because of hardware limitations. Disk2FDI is the first PC utility that
actually accomplishes this, ever. (You're gonna love Vincent's trick!)
To my knowledge, BBC disks haven't been read with Disk2FDI yet - anybody
care to try? (You'll need 2 floppy drives...) I'm sure Vincent would
be open for suggestions or problem reports.
I realize this is pretty young software (not "grown up" as such), but I
thought that you should at least know about its existance, and
particularly about the FDI format.
Cheers,
Robert
(whose only contribution to disk imaging technologies has been the
coining of the extensions "SSD" and "DSD"... :-)
Thomas Harte wrote:
>
> I'm the author of ElectrEm, an Acorn Electron emulator as the name suggests,
> and I've recently done a little poll and discovered that a wanted feature is
> really good disc emulation.
>
> So I want to implement supprt for a 'grown up' disc image format - i.e. one
> that can handle protected and generally strangely formatted discs. So I was
> wondering if there is an accepted one for BBC/Electron emulators that I just
> don't know about? As far as I can pick up, even the archimedes emulators
> seem to use adf as in ADFS not Amiga Disc Format.
>
> Which brings me to my next idea, if I just acquisitioned a format from
> another emulated computer system (e.g. ADF from the Amiga which just
> contains an MFM stream) would there be any support for that?
>
> -Thomas
>
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