>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.
If someone distributed copy-protected disks, he knowed that the life of that
software is limited. :(
>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?
e.g. Some of my own disks do. So I have designed SAD format to support disks
larger than usual 800KB. I don't know whether it works in SimCoupe, since
I don't have any disks dependingon this feature.
But if you put 840KB disk into PC drive and start SamBackup, it will
automatically detect it and make 840KB SAD image. If it will work in
SimCoupe???? I Don't know, I just use it for backuping purposes.
You must try, and you will see.
>> 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?
Possibly. But if the author really copy-protects the disk, he really don't
want you to make ANY copies of it.
>> 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).
Basic? Forgot!
You need to detect the format and then read the data.
If you make the code which will detect the format, then you can simply do
the code that will read one track.
>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).
Trio hasn't stretching ability.
I have Voodoo Banshee(!), and it doesn't stretching.
So you can speed up 2x2 screen, but you cannot use that nice interleaving.
Didn't you write colour-interleaving is your goal?
>> 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!
WinNT doesn't have accelerated DirectDraw.
You cannot use any hardware capabilities in WinNT!
(this applies to 2D,3D,audio,etc.)
>> 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.
>
Our NT stations hang when a program wants to switch to 640x480.
This is common to all DJGPP programs, and possibly all DOS programs (I have
only DJGPP ones.)
I really don't understand why "so perfect" WinNT so stupidly hangs.
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Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.)
phone: +420-68-538 70 35
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** http://get.to/aley
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