caps wwarp mfmwarp hardware copy stations

[Borg_Number_One]

hyvää päivää Toni
1.)
Could you insert support for wwarp and mfmwarp disk images?

2.)Which hardware methods exists to copy protected disks?
Short time ago I heared "Hardware Copy stations" or something like that at CAPS-project.org.
Furthermore there were mentioned some names of such stations.
Well, currently I cannot find them again?

So, what copy-stations (or devices which are able to write in low-low-low-low-low....-level) do exist?

[fiath]

Disk-to-disk hardware copiers are common (Cyclone, Synchro Express, etc. etc.), but are fairly useless nowadays, since you need real disks.

I guess what you want is a disk-image-to-real-disk device, and I am afraid to say that AFAIK none currently exist for Amiga originals. This will change in the future, but when rather relies on certain things, see this thread: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=14391

[Toni Wilen]

Could you insert support for wwarp and mfmwarp disk images?

Requires XPK decompression support and I am not going to port it just for this..

[Codetapper]

Also MFMWarp files and WWarp files are not guaranteed to be safe copies of an original disk, but they are often enough for a cracker to get a game working. If you know what you are doing you can extract the data from a warp file and convert it to something the emulator can use anyway.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Requires XPK decompression support and I am not going to port it just for this..

I don't think WWarp uses XPK compression.

For MFMWarp, if images are created using the CMODE NONE option, compression is not used. It makes sense to always use CMODE NONE when imaging disks, since whole-file compression afterwards (with gzip or whatever) gives better compression anyway. So "MFMWarp non-compressed only" support would still be useful.

Also, I'm sure someone could write a small Amiga tool to convert compressed MFMWarp images to uncompressed ones, so you wouldn't need to support XPK compressors in WinUAE.


-- M

[Codetapper]

There is a tool already which converts from MFMWarp to WWarp files.

But there is another issue with WWarp files in that the format is still evolving, and new disk formats are being added quite regularly. And any known formats require code to take the compressed data back to the MFM - basically it's a lot of work for Toni for not much point.

It would be better if everyone CAPS's their originals and then just use CAPS files!