Analyser Changes

2010-05-28

Added scripting parameter support to the script generator. This way it is possible to alter settings in the generator by creating a format/block descriptor with the preferred settings and analysing the track selecting the format.

The script generator now supports settings to change the gap pattern size of the last block/last gap zone to any arbitrary size.

For example, the “MFM” vs “MFM lblp 0” setting on any StarGlider 2 MFM track, say 0.1. The first format would preserve all the original gap patterns, but due to the way the disk was written it is not possible to detect that the last gap zone on either direction is a filler value - as a different value is being used for each direction.

While it is trivial to guess this is the case, it is not desirable as if they were not a fillers, setting them as such would destroy the original meaning. However viewing the track content it is clearly the original intent, so we can safely change their type to fillers, by setting their sizes to 0. This way we can generate a “cleaner” image, restoring not how the disk reads by blindly replicating the gap entirely, but how it was mastered instead - giving the same result, but even after changing the track size we’d get the correct result, which is not necessarily the case otherwise.

The script generator always defaults to the safest settings. It is rather conservative about what can be exactly replicated and what may need to be adopted according to the media parameters such as the actual track size. It is possible to override these preferences now - of course one has to really have to understand what they are doing.