Quote:
Originally Posted by BarryB
Are these still only for emulation use, not writing back to real disks?
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Good question, with a complex answer. In short, the IPFs are for emulation only. The diamond-shaped flux pattern for which the DM protection is infamous cannot be represented in an IPF. Instead the generated IPF uses very short (1-2 bitcell) weak regions to simulate the fuzzy most-significant bit in each data byte in the protection sector. Not a problem for an emulator to randomise one or two bits; but impossible to write to disk without being smart enough to swap back in something like the "diamond flux" trick.
To write to disk, the IPF can be converted to SCP using disk-utilities. The generated SCP *does* have the diamond-shaped flux pattern and will write to disk just fine using, for example, Greaseweazle.
Finally, I am working on IPF to HFEv3 conversion in the Greaseweazle tools. This will also support conversion of the DM and CSB IPF images to HFEv3 images which
FlashFloppy will support. However it will require a small extension to HFEv3 to support bit-granularity weak regions. So will require a new release of both Greaseweazle tools and FlashFloppy firmware. Watch this space in the coming weeks.
EDIT: It might be worth zipping the IPFs up with a README which summarises the above, if uploaded to the server.