On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: > I'm wondering how good a zip/tar.gz format would be for a disk -- i.e, > storing the actual files, and not a plain image of the disk. There's > probably little point if you're going to gzip it anyway. It would > involve replacing SamDOS/MasterDOS functions somehow, though.
I don't think that idea would really work, to be honest... for this to be suitable as a primary storage system you would still, somehow, need to store all the infomation that currently is in the sam's directory entry rather than the file itself - ie type, loading address, execution address etc. Also, you'd probably find that most software didn't know how to access your new system. Only programs which actually use SamDOS and BASIC to load files are likely to work, and thy're pretty few and far between. Pretty much all commercial games use their own bootstrap loader, so they wouldn't work. There are also quite a lot of sensible utilities which rely on working with the known format of a Sam disk, such as Ian's "less" and Stefan Drissen's MOD player. Besides, the whole point of an emulator is to have it work, as far as possible, in exactly the same way that the real hardware works. That means that we should expect to use disk images for file storage, rather than having some magical external file store gubbins. What *might* be a good idea, would be to add a feature to SimCoupe's menus (ie. in dialogue boxes, NOT from within the emulation) which would allow you to transfer files between the current .dsk and the host filesystem. There are already seperate programs which do this, but something integrated would probably be more intuative. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file --
