OS 3.2+ Request: additional format support for trackfile.device

[coldacid]

What are the chances of adding DMS and IPF support to trackfile.device, or providing some kind of extensibility mechanism so that other disk image formats can be used through trackfile.device and DAControl?

[Michael]

The problem with crunched formats they have to be expanded first, so effectively they will become adf's then. Nobody stops you from unpacking disks to DA virtual disks.
Yes, direct support would have been cool, but that requires a new layer to handle compression.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by coldacid

What are the chances of adding DMS and IPF support to trackfile.device, or providing some kind of extensibility mechanism so that other disk image formats can be used through trackfile.device and DAControl?

It could work, as the groundwork is already prepared. trackfile.device even supports TD_RAWREAD already (but no TD_RAWWRITE, because you may not be able to decode what was written and read it back with CMD_READ).

That said, the chief purpose of trackfile.device is to provide a thin caching layer on top of disk file access, with good performance and minimal memory usage. This is what enabled us to ship AmigaOS 3.2 as a disk set, using the same installation script both for physical 3.5" floppy disk media and all kinds of other mass storage media (CD-ROM, USB stick, etc.). For that purpose it's optimized and even has a few extra features in place which DAControl enables.

Both the features you requested and what trackfile.device currently supports (among these it attempts to faithfully emulate trackdisk.device, minus a few bugs) could fit into the same package, but you might end up with a much larger package. We'll see