Aley Keprt wrote: > If soomeone made a protection, he probably wanted us not to copy these > diskettes.
I just want to aim for fairly complete emulation, which would include being able to (ideally) handle everything the real floppy controller can to cope with non-standard disks. I'm certainly not doing it to allow disks to be distributed, but to extend the life of the software by allowing it to be run on the emulator. Don't some demos also use strange formats to allow more data to be packed onto disks, rather than to protect them. Anyone have any samples? > I'm affraid about copyright laws. I'm no legal expert, but isn't it just considered a backup copy as long as you still own the original version? > Since Sam can physically hanle much more sector sizes, it is almost > unpossible to use protected disks on pc. This only goes to reinforce why I want to do it - it'd be a shame if owners of copy protected disks can't play them on the emulator. > if we would copy these disks to an image, we would need a special software > for the regular sam. this is another complication. True, but once each protected disk had been run through the conversion you're done. It could probably be written as a BASIC program with some ASM to drive the floppy controller to work out what it is - doesn't really matter if it's slow (and it probably will be). > (of course, i'm very pesimistic.) I'd like to be optimistic for now :-) > Yes, e.g. ESI's demos which use double buffering are extremely slow > in emulator on 486's. but some other programs are pretty fast on the same > 486. > fortunbately, the eulator is fast enough on pentium 133 (or 166...) > and better machines. I'll have to take a look. I tend to go by the frame rate that I get on the SAM copyright screen since it's having to do a lot of redrawing because the palette's being changed. Most things won't do anything much heavier than that - you can always use the frame-skip (if it's in that version) to keep the framerate up. > when tested win32 vevrsion on p2/233 w/64mb ram & winnt, it runs quite > slow in double size window. (20 fps+-) One change since the last demo version is to have the DirectDraw surface in video memory if possible, since it then allows the use of various hardware features including the blitting and stretching done for the display. A lot of cheap video cards still don't support them, but more and more are doing now (the S3 Trio64V2 in work doesn't, but my Riva TNT at home does). > but this is probably the problem of winnt. maybe..... If the NT display drivers support the features (and they should if it's available under Win9x) then it'll run just as well in NT. It's screamingly fast on my PC at home! > the dos version doesn't work on winnt (at least here), so i can't compare 0.78 runs on my NT but hangs the system when I quit it. Si
