Added Reading Capability to Imaging Software

24 June 2001

The imaging software now has actual reading capability and allows us to image track data on any disk. For those disk protections that we know about, it allows us to get the data from the disk perfectly, though the current version only dumps one track at a time. For disk protections we do yet not know about, it gives us a better understanding on how they work, so we can add support for them at a later date.

It reads things like density information, timing etc. and currently produces huge files. For example, in reading all the different data that we need from a disk specified above, we get files of about 86Kb a track (as opposed to what can be stored in normal MFM mode which is just over 7Kb - this is what is saved in an ADF file). A whole disk could be 160 times larger in this format.

An analyser is also under development which will bring the size down to around 1-2Mb per disk.