Work-In-Progress Reports for June 2008

Amstrad CPC Emulator Support for IPF files: Simon Owen has successully added support for the SPS plugin to the Caprice32 Amstrad CPC emulator, which available on sourceforge. His changes are not yet official, and there is still a bit of tidying up to do, but hopefully they will be included in the main project. (more)

New Amiga Disk Formats Supported: We have been busy adding various new amiga formats to the analyser. Recently, we have added support for: * Another Ubi Soft variant, this time without checksums. * Various formats used by the games: The Champ, Turn it, Vindex, Clown-O-Mania, PP Hammer, Intact, Lorna, Street Racer * More Turtle Byte protection variations. * Another CHW variant. * Protection on Alien Legion. * Partial support for Deep Core. (more)

Analyser: Block Pattern Matching Continued: The last place that did not use groups for block pattern matching was the header pattern matching, and has now been updated. Previously it was using a header if its CRC was good or if it was just the first header in the group. Now it treats a CRC match as something that makes certain operations more confident in the result, but not as a strict guidline. (more)

Analyser: Dealing with read errors: We've found an image where read errors made the blocks impossible to pair even with the latest algorithm, so now we've added a new "last resort" method to it, which based on probability. This will be used if all else fails.

Analyser: Testing: After some heavy testing of the new algorithms, we have found some extreme cases that helped us to enhance the system even more.

Analyser: Data Grouping Logic / Reading Troublesome Disks: Since adding format pattern recognition requires a different approach to track resolving, the script generator required various changes. During the process we came up with an enhanced version of the data grouping logic that is less sensitive to random read errors on a track. The result is that many more difficult to read disks are completely resolved, automatically, first time. (more)

Analyser: Block Matching: We've enhanced the block matching further. Now it is possible to tell the size of the area to be checked for matches, and the minimum required and maximum allowed of occurances within that area for the match to succeed. This makes it possible to write more relaxed patterns, where, for example, only a certain amount of data should match. (more)

Analyser: Progress: The block pattern matching system is now finished; after some debugging, CTA recognises ST Protections again. This new system supports lots of very useful things that are all very handy for describing ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum and other systems/formats with minimal effort and much better accuracy than the original version. (more)