Re: Converting .nib images to .dsk images

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

In comp.sys.apple2 Matthew Clark <clarkbhm@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The reason that it's in a .nib format instead of a .dsk format is that it 
> was written on Catakig. According to Catakig's creator, "Catakig can read 
> DSK, PO, and NIB disks, but it has its own native format which it prefers, 
> and which it uses for both reading and writing floppy disk images. This 
> format is a gzip-compressed NIB format, which provides the versatility of 
> that format but yields a smaller file size, smaller even than DSK."

I would expect .DSK.gz to be smaller than .NIB.gz.  I did a quick test
just now with the CiderPress disk image converter (which uses the zlib
equivalent of the "-9" flag when compressing .gz) and found that the DOS
3.3 system master was 72KB as ".do.gz" and 97KB as ".nib.gz".

Which leads me to believe that, if a ".dsk" image contained nothing but
compressed data, the ".nib.gz" file would actually be larger than the ".dsk".

(Yes, this is entirely academic.)

-- 
Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/
CD-Recordable FAQ - http://www.cdrfaq.org/
CiderPress Apple II archive utility for Windows - http://www.faddensoft.com/
Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/