8 Aug
2004
8 Aug
'04
3:31 p.m.
On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 21:34:24 +0100 (BST)
ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
As far as I know the format of a Teledisk archive file has never been
officially documented. IMHO that makes it totally unsuitable to use as
a portable archibe format. And I don't think it covers things like GCR
recording, sectors with headers recorded at a different density to the
data, hard sectored disks, and so on.
Not to start a flame-war, but we're talking about methods using various
equipment to archive and/or analyze foreign diskettes. 'Running an
MS-DOS machine' amounts to having one somewhere in the shop you can use
for this kind of specialized work. If you detest Microsoft, use DR-DOS
or FreeDOS or any of the alternatives. Obviously nobody (or barely
anybody) 'runs' an MS-DOS machine as a primary workstation in this day
and age. It would make sense, though, to recognize that a machine like
that is useful for a few occasional purposes and not 'boycott' them for
some high-and-holy reason.
But as a file-format geek, I always thought a central
part of the
nut to crack was a metafile format. Archiving real-world antique
floppies means some of them are going to have bad sectors. (Let's
leave copy-protection errors aside for a moment.) You need an
archiving file format that can record the fact of the known error.
It would also be handy to have a way to store corresponding info
such as a description of the disk's contents, as if you'd be
able to store the label along with the archived disk image.
This already exists since more than 10 years now and is called
TeleDisk, also try AnaDisk to analyse foreign disks, both
programs can be
found everywhere on the net.
Only if you happen to run an MS-DOS PC.