[Codetapper]

Originally posted by andreas
Define "tamper".

To modify bytes INSIDE a file. Slicing the useless blank part of the end of a disk is not modifying the file if that part is never used.

(The following section applies to AmigaDOS disks only, not to alien formats!)

Only a complete twat would resize an AmigaDos disk because filenames are hashed to form a key which is used as a reference to jump to the files start position on a disk. Remaining sectors can be spread all over the disk so the only disks which have the end bits sliced off are NDos disks, not AmigaDos.

I am talking about NDos for this entire thread.

slicing out = tampering = modifying (in some way)

But it might be useful to *not* "optimize" this and thus give someone with technical understanding a way to write such an image back to disk, for example if the original real disk is fucked someday in the future, he can still revert to this image. If non-used tracks are removed, the image is non-standard and can be used in WHDload ONLY once and for all...

Again you are wrong. Take Stunt Car Racer with it's 450k Disk.1 file. Download Diskwiz from my website and type:

diskwiz Disk.1 df0: >NIL:

Reboot your amiga, lo and behold, Stunt Car Racer works (well the cracked version without the protection anyway).

If a game is 900k but only ever loads the first 200k, why the hell keep the other 700k?

Let's take another example. Some games store over 1Mb of data on the disk. Let's say that the game only uses the first 400k. By your logic you would release this as a 2 disk game because the original holds 1Mb of data and you can only fit 900k on a disk. Yet disk 2 would only have 100k and it would be complete garbage which the game didn't use.

Anyway, fortunately some disk images (e. g. Last Battle by Elite) were *NOT* touched by either imager nor WHDload, so I could just rename Disk.1 to something.ADF and use it in the emulator without any problems!!
Isn't that wonderful? If you *optimize* an AmigaDOS image, you cannot do this any longer because the emulator doesn't understand under-sized images!

That is an emulator problem, this has nothing to do with WHDLoad. Some people make ADF's which hold 82 tracks, so do these also not work in an emulator? If so, contact Toni and ask him to change the emulator. There is no need on NDos disks to force an ADF to be 901120 bytes.

One more point, people complain to the WHDLoad guys that a certain game won't run on a stock A1200 with 2Mb because it doesn't have enough memory. If we slice the disk image down so it can be played, we have others bitching at us that we have modified the game. We can't win