Work-In-Progress Reports for June 2005

Analyser: Data Priority, Block Size Recovery: Data that is confirmed good now has prioirty over predicted data; this is useful for slightly broken disks. In addition the analyser can now recognize protection formats where the data block size cannot be recovered from the headers, and it uses the correct data size instead. (more)

Analyser: Automatic Descriptor Building: Now the system is able to build a complete description of the disk format based on the data found on a track. This is tested on various protection methods, and once it is proven okay the cached data needs to be translated into the script language used by the rest of the analyser. (more)

Analyser: Prediction System: Embedded and overlapping blocks are fairly hard to script automatically, especially now that the detection of the correct area and checksum information is automated. To solve this, a prediction based system has now been created. There are now predicted data events based on previous data, and confirmed data events. (more)

Analyser: Integrity Check Improvements: Tried some Atari ST disk images in the analyser with the new integrity checks in place, and found a few images that produced errors. This was most notably on flakey bit protections and special data tracks that are not readable with block commands. (more)

Analyser: Pre-Processing Improvements: Many more preprocessing and indexing features have been added to the analyser that will eliminate the need for some extremely complicated functions later on. The analyser informs the user if it finds any data that it cannot yet understand correctly, including a dump of the offending data's location. This can be used to check the data, as is usually done in the track dump displays.

Analyser: Data Preprocessing, Mark Detection: Data Preprocessing If the script generator is invoked, the data is now preprocessed in a way that makes it considerably easier to create Atari ST format scripts from them than it used to be. Mark Detection Detection and report of any marks used on a track that would otherwise be ignored by the later analysation. (more)