sicklittlemonkey wrote:
On Jan 20, 10:25 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:Whoa! Nice SST/.nib hack!Thanks, but it's really abuse of the NIB format since half track behaviour is emulator specific for now. ;-)..so I'm guessing that SST *does* do synchronized reads, to allow the merging?I'm not quite sure what you mean. Are you talking about track synchronization in hope of supporting partial use of adjacent half/ whole tracks? (Spiral etc.) I simply captured the whole tracks and half tracks on different SST passes, so two different images were captured.
Yes, I meant keeping the partial (and whole) tracks properly time-aligned so that protection code would find the right things. For example, some schemes duplicated sector numbers, so that unless you read the correct time-aligned one, you got the wrong data.
Still we await the coming of The New Disk Image Format. ;-)
Right. The problem I see is that any format that is comprehensive enough to cover a large fraction of protection schemes is also very much more complex than the existing, simple formats. Further, there would be little impetus to support a new format unless it covered almost everything... For all their variety, there were only a few (dozen?) protection schemes that were widely used. If a few human deprotectors were to specialize in a couple of schemes each, then a simple sort would result in a pretty high deprotection rate. I know there are some collectors who prize preserving the protections themselves, but just keeping an archive of deprotection of them would preserve the technology. Copying the copy-protections themselves is just perverse. ;-) -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."