TomCh wrote:
Or just use the established .2mg format (which AppleWin has supported the past year).
In principle, I like the idea of .2mg for exactly this purpose. It
would be genuinely nice if a single format could represent DOS-ordered
or ProDOS-ordered sector/block dumps with volume number, or nibbleized
disks.
My problem with it is that it's so inconsistently implemented across
programs which "support" the format that I don't really think you can
call it "established," despite it having been around for a long time.
Based on how I've seen several different programs support .2mg, it's
really become just a (IMO superfluous) 64-byte header for ProDOS-
ordered block dumps, almost always 400K and up. In the programs I've
seen which support it, its header data is either ignored, or used to
convey the block size of the image (which could be just as easily done
by looking at the file length). I haven't seen a single program for
Mac OS X or Apple II that honors volume number or DOS-ordered sector
dumps in .2mg files.
So I'm all for AppleWin and CiderPress supporting volume numbers for
sector-dump disk images, but doing so in 2mg format it still doesn't
really help out users of Sweet16, Virtual II, ADTPro, DiskMaker 8,
etc.
So for disks which require a volume number but are otherwise standard,
I'd propose any and all of the following:
a) establish a new standard for putting volume number, if needed, in
the filename of the disk image, and lobby emulator and utility
developers to adopt it.
b) distribute NIBs along with corresponding whole-disk ShrinkIt
archives, thereby providing a solution for both emulated and real
Apple II's. (ProDOS 8 ShrinkIt saves and restores the volume number
with the compressed block-dump data.)
c) actually review .2mg, come to consensus as to what the spec really
is or should be (if we're going to have the clutter of a header, then
I'd propose a checksum), and then lobby emulator and utility
developers to consistently adopt .mg2 or whatever the new version will
be called.
Thoughts?