On Nov 19, 11:40 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
Capturing (even fractional) tracks from a protected floppy is only
part of the problem of recovering its data. There was a *long*
thread regarding the representation of protected floppies over a
year ago, IIRC.
Sooner maybe.
Yes, capturing by sampling is easy. The real problem is analyzing the
data. Somewhere in the middle is the choice of representation that
will be both simple yet effective (and just enough). My definition of
simple/effective ratio covers pure software implementations (e.g.
emulators on PC), pure hardware (emulators on FPGAs and the likes) and
mixed (e.g. emulators of diskettes done with MCUs and some helper
circuitry).
Although I still favor the .FDI format, I don't think that the current
size and "vigor" of the Apple II community would support establishing
a new "standard" image format for protected disks, and the emulators
and utilities to make them useful.
Recently I am spending some time on the problem and so far have setup
of a simple board with MCU that controls directly the Disk ][ drive
and samples the data for many rotations. Sampled stream is sent via
USB to PC. Capturing DSK-style images is done already as a trivial
task, but some analysis is being worked on. Final goal is making
images (like Disk2FDI) but tuned specially and only to the Apple2.