AlexH,
Yes, they could. We however encourage people NOT to use stream dumps/raw dumps directly.
1, They can't be compared at all; it's simply impossible without throwing massive computing power at it (like we already do when pre-processing the data for IPF files). You will end up with hundreds of dumps with the exact same game and you will never ever know whether it's a different version than another or not.
2, They require quite some processing, which is not suitable for emulators on embedded systems.
3, You will never ever know whether they are fully good or not - unless you play them from beginning to the end.
4, You will never ever know whether they are original authentic data, something cracked/patched (by parameter copiers etc), or even a personal backup.
5, You CANNOT correctly write these back to disk, it's simply rolling the dice. Disk duplication never ever worked on unknown data, anyone saying otherwise has never had anything to do with duplication.
With old disks like these it's very likely that you read good data from a track here and there and you can merge these together by clever algorithms taking into account keeping the original gaps etc correctly. This is how IPFs are done. If you are hoping to get a good read in a single revolution from an old disk for all of the tracks... good luck with that. It did not happen in 2001, when preserving for CAPS started, it won't happen now, when disks are 13 years older...
While would you want all of THAT mess? Wouldn't you are better off with games that are known to work as much as the original and are proven to be originals and error free...?
Oh wait you can: it's called IPF.
Trust me, it would have been a HELL LOT EASIER to just let people use raw dumps and be done with it in 2001 (!!!).
We do care about preservation - and see above the problems with raw dumps. Anyone saying you otherwise is a snake oil salesman, nothing more and cares nothing at all about preservation or even the quality of your backups. The only interest is to have something out the door with a software that can be written in 2 weekends at most in visual basic.
Mark_k,
See above.
It's not like emulator authors can't have access to CT RAW format, but they DO understand these problems.
And no, everything in CT Raw was custom designed at the time to be able to run that speed on 68020+.
And here is a list of the largely unknown IPF format as supported by emulators:
IPF:
WinUAE
Spectaculator
Caprice
SimCoupe
Steem
Hatari
Winston
MESS
EMU
+probably others released or in development I can’t even remember…
As for using that other raw format... I highly recommend this thread where the reality has been exposed, but there are tons of those in various forums...
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51253
Regardless, we had a poll on our own website about future development and using stream dumps and using custom format scripting (like Trace used FreeForm) were popular items.
So upcoming releases of KF software will move towards those territories.
Despite this, using stream dumps WILL come with huge warnings both in manual and in the program explaining to the user why it is not a good idea in general, unless having fun for a few minutes
Additionally, if you REALLY want to use stream files, as is:
HxC
A new emulator PC-E, see the below thread:
http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=765