Work-In-Progress Reports for March 2005

22 March 2005

Son Shu Shi: As some may have noticed, the Amiga game "Son Shu Shi" how now been preserved with the help of Patrick Tamine (a friend of the author of the game at the time), Adrian Simpson of HOL and Codetapper of HOL/WHDLoad. Unfortunately, the only remaining disks were no longer in good condition. So we had to reconstruct them from the corrupt data by finding out exactly what went wrong. (more)

20 March 2005

Track Gap Revisited: Now it is possible to have a gap of 1...4 bytes used as a self-repeating stream, or a 1...2 byte different stream for the track gap, before and after the overlap position. Old code related to this was almost completely rewritten to use a much more elegant and readable solution, it was getting way too complex. (more)

19 March 2005

Track Gaps: The track gap handling changed in addition to the previous update. Track gap encoding is re-aligned in a way that always simulates starting the "disk" writing process from the track overlap position and running it until before the same position. This change is only noticable with track gaps that are different from default values. (more)

16 March 2005

IPF Library Enhancement: The decoder now handles a special case. Previously, if the track gap ended with a 1 bit, the data syncing on the first block may have had its first data byte improperly encoded if it was not a mark. This fix will be useful mostly for Atari ST images with non-standard track gap values, it does not happen on any of the existing Amiga images.