ADFCHK (ADF checker for ADOS disk images) - v0.2.1 released

[andreas]

Greetings,

even though there has been almost exactly one year between ADFCHK v0.1.4R and now, development on this tool surely wasn't supposed to get halted anytime soon!
In fact, the greatest part of work has been happening behind the scenes, hours of testing, debugging ... and also adding features ...
Well then.
Let me do everything in a nutshell (unlike others )---here's the new feature list:

- DMS file support!! (please consider this still EXPERIMENTAL, thanks)

- BOOT block virus detection support: 
  Byte Bandit (3 variants supported [NB: encoded ones to come]), Byte Warrior, 
  Joshua 1 + 2, Pentagon Circle 1 + 2, Little Sven, Eleni 1 (MessAngel-B), 
  Sepultura, and Leviathan

- FILE virus detection support: 
  Jeff/Butonic (versions 1.31 + 3.10), SADDAM/IRAK
  
- Detection of special disk formats/signatures:
 -- Rob Northen Copylock disks (DosType = 'RNC')
 -- Quarterback backup sets (DosType = 'Qb'+number or 'QB'+number)

- CRC32 is now calculated and displayed in the log files

- Format-independent DMS transfer error detection (DMS!!ERR)
  (will also handle NDOS disks)

- Deep-checking (automatic) of DATA blocks [1]; now also detects errors due to:
 -- Bad sequence numbers
 -- Bad nextData pointers
 -- Illegal validData values (greater than 0x1E8 or less than 0x01)

[1] (NOTE: Deep checking gets auto-disabled for blocks with illegal header key numbers,
in order to prevent misdetections! ADFCHK cannot act like a clairvoyant and wildly guess the file which the data block belongs to: hence a valid file header pointer is a MUST!)

To you Linux guys: I BLINDLY modified the Makefile to adapt it to my new source tree, but I couldn't test it yet! So I'm sure you will report me soon if I succeeded in breaking anything (quite likely )

[edit] NOTE: Source will now be available via SourceForge ONLY. (also to ensure that only people download this who actually plan to do something with it )

---------------------------------------
NEW HOME:
http://adfchk.sourceforge.net/
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[prowler]

Thanks for the new version, andreas!

[andreas]

You're welcome, hoping anyone will actually use it, too

[prowler]

The new version looks very thorough. Occasionally, some checksum errors slip through TSgui.

[chiark]

Looks good, and nice work on the batch files too

Have you considered putting full expansion tools into this too - the current ADF tools for Win32 (xdms and readdisk) are rather sparse...

[andreas]

Hi chiark, and thanks for the feedback!
(Next time I'll try to post in 'Amiga scene', since the reactions on here are always too sparse! )

Uhm, seemingly you've lost me ... what do you mean by "full expansion tools"?
I nicked DMS support *from* xdms, and even removed all the readdisk stuff, since my tool is mainly made for error-checking, and this does not require unpacking single files from a DMS at all.

You seem to think of an alternative to ADFOpus, don't you?
Well, the basic idea is good, but first I need to think of a GUI. I've looked thru some GPL'd ones, but most of them are for C++ and I am actually NOT going to implement a clumsy "C tool implements C++ GUI via a sort of 'IDL'" solution. Count me out.

[chiark]

that's about it - at the moment the tools I use on PC are xDMS and Readdisk. Getting working versions of these is troublesome, and I'd love to see a maintained, available version that did DMS checking/adf expansion and the checking you're doing.

For my sins, I've never used ADFOpus... I'll check that out, but it looks like what I wanted

[andreas]

Back with a small update: v0.2.2.

Finally found time to track down that ugly bug!
Briefly, there was one free() statement too much, which was left in from debugging, and which for some weird reason still kept the tool working in newer Windows OS, but made my (still existing) Win2000 installation bail out with a nasty GPF! (Well, I'm actually glad it had crashed! Now it is likely to provide even more stability on OSes > Win2K as well.)

Should also fix exceptionally rare but annoying (and virtually impossible to reproduce on demand) lockup issue on Vista/7 when scanning hordes of DMSes (versions < 0.2.2 then required adfchk.exe to be removed from process list in Task Manager; luckily, the burden of performing this awkward step has now been taken off the user's shoulders)

Lastly, some minor console output fixes were applied as well.

[Korodny]

(Edit: never mind, issue already solved)