12-29-2013, 08:22 PM
IPF can be extended to support whatever is required. That said, it currently doesn't support a few schemes found on Amiga, such as Dungeon Master v2.x and a few of the Psygnosis games that use a fairly unique encoding method.
See here for more detail, specifically the link in that first post.
In short, SPS group has to extend IPF to give it a way to describe that format.
I've always thought IPF was great format for mastering disks, but was surprised that they came up with a way to use it in emulators. It's sort of odd, and requires a DLL file that acts as a drive emulator to feed the parent emulator the data it's requesting.
A flux level image seems more natural to me, but puts more onus on the emulator author to now add low-level disk drive emulation to the code in order to read/write flux data as the drive would see it, including all the quirks inherent in those drives (exactly how timing violations are handled, weak bits, drive spin up, head seek times, mechanical variations, etc).
I think I saw somewhere that the MESS authors were implementing some sort of flux level images for their disk-based systems. If anyone's hardcore about emulation accuracy, it's them.
See here for more detail, specifically the link in that first post.
In short, SPS group has to extend IPF to give it a way to describe that format.
I've always thought IPF was great format for mastering disks, but was surprised that they came up with a way to use it in emulators. It's sort of odd, and requires a DLL file that acts as a drive emulator to feed the parent emulator the data it's requesting.
A flux level image seems more natural to me, but puts more onus on the emulator author to now add low-level disk drive emulation to the code in order to read/write flux data as the drive would see it, including all the quirks inherent in those drives (exactly how timing violations are handled, weak bits, drive spin up, head seek times, mechanical variations, etc).
I think I saw somewhere that the MESS authors were implementing some sort of flux level images for their disk-based systems. If anyone's hardcore about emulation accuracy, it's them.