15 January 2010, 10:56 | #1 |
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Noob Question 1: Amiga formats
Hi everybody and please don't shoot me. The answers to my questions are certainly to be found here or easily on the net but I wanted to ask the professionals here about Amiga formats with some explanations if possible.
I've seen that there are some formats for Amiga games, programs, demos, etc. and wanted to ask what they were and how they can be used/loaded. ADF I think the original Amiga uses the ADF format and that it can be used with UAE if I’m not mistaken. LHA What’s that and how to make it work? DMS or DMA (can’t remember sorry) What’s that and how to make it work? Are there other formats and how and with which programs can they be used? Feel free to treat me as the biggest noob ever and thanks in advance for your help on this. |
15 January 2010, 11:11 | #2 |
Going nowhere
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ADF - Is a plain image of an Amiga formatted disk, much like an ISO is an image of a CD. ADF = Amiga Disk Format
LHA - Is an Amiga archiver that works and does the same job as ZIP DMS - Disk Masher System, basically images an Amiga disk and compresses each track as it reads the disk to create an archive of the disk. Whereas LHA or ZIP will archive files, lots of Amiga disks have no native AmigaDOS filesystem, so DMS images it as tracks so that you can still copy the information. |
15 January 2010, 11:32 | #3 |
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Wow! Thanks a lot Galahad/FLT for your prompt answer
Does the LHA contain ADF. files or all sort of files and do you need a specific program to "unzip" them (do you need an Amiga to do this or a PC)? And now the greatest noob question for the whole day: why would you use LHA or DMS files exactly (perhaps to have a concrete example on how using it)? Sorry, I really don't know nothing about this. And last but not least are there other formats? |
15 January 2010, 11:39 | #4 |
The 1 who ribbits
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for lha think zip,rar,ace,7z all compressors
as Galahad said dms packs each track on a disk so as and adf is 900k or so the same dms file could be smaller |
15 January 2010, 11:49 | #5 |
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Thanks cosmicfrog I understand a little better now. So you use this to save memory/place on your HD and/or to make it easier to download several Amiga files? Still one more question: how to "unzip" the files or waht programs are needed?
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15 January 2010, 11:56 | #6 |
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You can unarchive lha files in an amiga enviroment or you can use winrar to unpack them on your pc ;-)
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15 January 2010, 11:58 | #7 | |
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Quote:
You can use ZIP and RAR on the Amiga also. |
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15 January 2010, 12:07 | #8 | |
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If someone else would want to complete these informations or add more content that would be very much appreciated as I'm noting down all these comments to make me an Amiga Noob Guide. If it interests somebody I can publish all the answers once I have more information for other beginners like me (of course with credits to all the members who helped). Again, THANKS A LOT!!! YOU?RE THE BEST!!! And a big thank to Graham Humphrey too for this precious addition I'm really beginning to understand here |
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15 January 2010, 12:10 | #9 |
move.l #$c0ff33,throat
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Standard ADF is 880k (80*512*11*2=901120 bytes).
I wouldn't really recommend ZIP for Amiga stuff since it doesn't handle protection bits/file comments etc. |
15 January 2010, 12:50 | #10 |
The 1 who ribbits
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if you say so StingRay though 901120 bytes looks like 900kbytes to me
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15 January 2010, 13:18 | #11 |
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15 January 2010, 13:25 | #12 | |
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Quote:
I can't match the previous posters' technical knowledge but in case it helps here is a basic, practical description. If you had an Amiga game that only worked from a floppy and you wanted to e-mail it to a friend, you might adf or dms it - and then save the resulting .adf or .dms file to attach to your e-mail. My (limited) understanding of these programs is that they create an exact disk image of the floppy, so that when it is written back to a floppy, the data will be written to exactly the same locations as on the original floppy, which is crucial for some software. Note - these programs are not designed to be able to make copies of protected floppies. (a bit of a background example) The WHDLoad guys, when they work their magic to make old Amiga games run from hard drive and compatible with newer machines, sometimes break the game down into its original files, and sometimes use disk images. The disk images will often be called disk.1 disk.2 etc but they are probably just .adf files that could (if you wanted to) be written back to floppy. The patchers (cunning chaps that they are) write a special slave file for the game that enables it to run from you hard drive. If you had some files to e-mail to a friend - maybe pictures or audio or a game that wasn't reliant on being run from floppy, you could use a program like Lha to compress them into a single .lha file that your friend could then decompress with Lha or a compatible program. I've found it quite useful just as a way of bundling a few files together into a single file regardless of how effective the compression, as its more convenient just e-mailing one large file than lots of little ones. Note - programs like Lha obviously restore the archived file to its exact original form when it is decompressed. Its not like JPEG compression that uses "lossy" compression where it sheds data from an image to reduce file size at the cost of quality - that would be fatal for a computer program. |
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15 January 2010, 13:31 | #13 |
move.l #$c0ff33,throat
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15 January 2010, 13:33 | #14 |
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15 January 2010, 13:35 | #15 | |
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Quote:
Just a generic term coined by UAE to describe an Amiga disk. |
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15 January 2010, 13:49 | #16 | |
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Quote:
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15 January 2010, 13:55 | #17 |
move.l #$c0ff33,throat
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Not to be nitpicking but disk images DID exist long before UAE. They just weren't called ADF.
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15 January 2010, 15:14 | #18 |
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Thanks to StingRay, Angus, Skateblind, alexh, thomas for their precious help and clarifications. Special thanks to Angus who really gave much details here and helping me understand.
I made a little research and 880 k seems to be the right number but coming from a noob like me it doesn't mean much. Hope that you continue here as I'm leraning much in a minimum of time. This forum definitly rocks |
16 January 2010, 11:47 | #19 |
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I used to use DMS a lot for transferring Amiga disks to PC, because if you're copying files over via 720k-formatted PC disks, you need to compress the disk 880K Amiga disk image, and DMS conveniently reads and compresses at the same time. If the disk doesn't compress to under 720k, DMS can also read in two halves. You then turn the DMS file into an ADF file using DMS on under WinUAE.
However, it's probably more convenient to use transdisk (comes with WinUAE) to create ADF files, compress with lha and split those, since lha can be unzipped directly on Windows using WinRAR or 7-Zip. I'll have to look up what software is required to split and combine files. |
16 January 2010, 19:51 | #20 | |
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Quote:
Thanks again and just look down for Jonathan's answer Last edited by Peilton; 17 January 2010 at 14:55. |
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