IPF Library Changes - Done!

2010-05-26

Multi platform support is finished!

As you may be aware, there has been loads of working done in preparation for going completely multi-platform with images, tools and the library.

The IPF library was originally designed with constrains of MFM encoding in mind, therefore it used a fairly simple method to create the track data. Due to the fact that some other encoding formats do not have the same constraints, the decoder/encoder part of the library had to be redesigned, and indeed now about 95% of the IPF decoding/track encoding has been rewritten from scratch.

Some of the limitations of the previous version of the encoder in the IPF library no longer apply. Most notably, encoded data is not aligned to byte boundaries - data is now exactly at the same position as it is on the master disk used to create the IPF.

We are now starting a period of testing to ensure there are no problems with the current set of preserved disk images.