While I was reading the source code and commit history on the PCE
emulator, I found there was some rather recent development in an
interesting area. mac-gcr? Whoah, what’s this, the capability to
handle disk images at the lowest level? Applesauce disk images, PRI
disk images? Whoah, what’s that? It’s the specially built hardware
to read those disk images? Yep, and wow, it’s with modern
manufacturing. You know the long dead Catweasel and KryoFlux? Well,
about KryoFlux… they’re still alive and well, but yeah, they have
those weird licensing terms.
All of this in the midst of Linus Torvalds killing off the floppy disk driver from Linux. Well, yeah, I guess it is sadly fitting… all of these modern hardwares are using their own highly advanced drivers. Floppy disks are still alive and well, but the software world moves on.
Important! See my older blog articles on the same subject.
So, the next in line high tech flux disk imagers. The SuperCard Pro is a rather old one, it’s been around since 2013 with an emphasis on Amiga and Commodore systems. cmbstuff.com is the name of the website.
20190926/DuckDuckGo pro flux image floppy
20190926/http://www.cbmstuff.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=16
20190926/http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=71853
20190926/http://www.cbmstuff.com/
20190926/http://www.cbmstuff.com/about.htm
Next in line is the Applesauce disk imager, designed specifically for use with Apple II systems, and also capable of supporting Macintosh disk images by extension. So, my old trick on reading/writing Macintosh disk images with an Apple II has been revealed to the masses.
20190926/DuckDuckGo applesauce flux image
20190926/https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceFlux4
20190926/https://archive.org/details/flux_capacity
20190926/https://archive.org/details/flux_capacity?tab=about
20190926/DuckDuckGo internet archive flux image
20190926/DuckDuckGo applesauce flux image floppy disk
20190926/https://applesaucefdc.com/a2r/
20190926/https://applesaucefdc.com/
All of these flux disk imagers are, by definition, custom floppy disk controllers.
I have to say… these developments being much more out in the open, wow that is really handy! By doing so, and by doing so in mass numbers, we are finally building true open industry standards for representing low-level disk image data. Sure, I understand the original motivation is for precisely copying copy-protected games, as it must be, since almost all vintage computing is gaming and entertainment-motivated, but think about the possibilities of extending this technology further. It is merely a matter of scaling the technology and principles to reach the level of libre hard disk imagers for do-it-yourself low-level hard drive data recovery.
Although there were various reasons why I pulled out of the vintage computing community and was dormant for quite a while, namely that I felt I did not have sufficient resources to do a whole lot interesting in there, now I am back to taking a look at what they’re off to, and wow, they don’t slow down.
Now, another reflection I have is that of emulator disk image development. My first experience with vintage computing disk imaging was Apple II Disk Transfer ProDOS. The documentation of ADT ProDOS specifically indicates that the more advanced format capable of copying the nibble and half-tracks of copy-protected disk images was only supported by Virtual ][ A2V2. So yeah, there was always a stratification in the level of support of sophisticated disk image formats, and as I understood it, the simpler formats were more practical when they worked. But, the big point in hand that I have here is that emulator support for advanced disk imaging formats is scaling up by a lot now, for whatever reason.
My first suspicion is simply that the developers of these newer disk imagers are doing a much better job with community engagement, especially with documenting the file formats their hardware produces. Even though they are still proprietary software developers, these new folks on the block are trying to do a much better job with an open community model. By all means, this has attracted the interest of some big parties such as the Internet Archive that are scanning disk images en masse, making it a much greater value proposition for emulator developers to support the more advanced disk image formats. So that’s another reason why we’re seeing more development on this front nowadays than we did 10 years ago.