Analyser: Generic MFM Support - Gap Analyser Implementation

2010-03-25

Now implemented the proposed solution although the rules have been enhanced a bit after some testing, since there were some specific cases where it was practically impossible to tell if gap data was intended or not, and the meaning was only revealed when looking at other data. This has been resolved through the rule enhancements.

Now CTA (SPS Disk Image Analyser) makes more-or-less the same decisions about gap data as we would.

All images that were failing previously work now. The auto-detection is sophisticated enough to automatically generate correct images of, for example, Thalion’s ST games, which have fairly complex disk structure to prevent copying. Now if only we had unmodified dumps of those...! (hint hint)

The gap analyser has been tuned to keep gap data that is (almost) certain to be part of a protection scheme and discard anything else - not too aggressive, but not as permissive as it used to be either. Should the need arise, we could later add runtime parameters by creating new MFM descriptors (invoking the MFM script generator), and those could for example fine tune/select different methods for images that don’t work with the preferred settings.

We now need to do some rather rigorous testing. Verification of a few hundred images should be okay to start with...