12-28-2013, 10:54 AM
IPF is meant to be used for mastering the original media, and it's not limited to Amiga. In the case of an IPF for a magnetic medium, think of it as a set of instructions for the floppy controller on how to write each track of the disk. The script language used specifically describes gaps, bit rate, checksums, data, etc.
As such, it's not easy to simply convert something to IPF. Someone has to look at the disk structure/data to determine what it all really is and then build an accurate description file from this. That is what the SPS team spent all these years doing. Some IPF files are standard AmigaDOS images with no protection, but the data has all been verified to be correct and original as far as disk structure goes (if there are bugs in a game's code that were present at manufacturing, that's a different issue).
If you were going to make a duplicate of a picture poster, you could think of IPF as an instruction list for how to draw the poster yourself, right down to coordinates to draw lines between, exact colours to use, pen type, etc. On the other hand, you can think of SCP files as a hi-res scan of the poster you fed in.
It might be nice if the SuperCard Pro software had the ability to write IPF files back to disk, but any sort of automatic creation of IPF files would be half-assed and unreliable without some serious AI behind it.
As such, it's not easy to simply convert something to IPF. Someone has to look at the disk structure/data to determine what it all really is and then build an accurate description file from this. That is what the SPS team spent all these years doing. Some IPF files are standard AmigaDOS images with no protection, but the data has all been verified to be correct and original as far as disk structure goes (if there are bugs in a game's code that were present at manufacturing, that's a different issue).
If you were going to make a duplicate of a picture poster, you could think of IPF as an instruction list for how to draw the poster yourself, right down to coordinates to draw lines between, exact colours to use, pen type, etc. On the other hand, you can think of SCP files as a hi-res scan of the poster you fed in.
It might be nice if the SuperCard Pro software had the ability to write IPF files back to disk, but any sort of automatic creation of IPF files would be half-assed and unreliable without some serious AI behind it.