Minimig Discimage support

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Revision as of 13:11, 26 September 2007 by Freqmax (talk | contribs) (SD-Card connected with floppy connector)
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Support for more disc formats?

Filetype
.adf Already supported, limitations? Faq
.adz .adf with gzip, not supported as of 070728.
.dms Proprietary, Closed source, Buggy compression algorithm
.fdi Worth supporting? (pc format)

.adz and other compressed formatss could possible be supported these ways:

  • Reuse the FPGA<->MCU link to send plain data. FPGA decodes the compression and serves the sector. An index file of where each sector starts in the original file needed to avoid uncompressing it all everytime?
  • Use sdram such that the whole disc image can be uncompressed to a portion of the ram that will be hidden from the simulation enviroment. The fpga loads any disc sectors from ram thereafter.
  • Use ethernet such that a server can read->decompress->send via network any needed sector. Any timeing needed can be faked by pretending the "drive" is seeking when it's infact transfering it over network and read from a buffer on arrival. Preferrebly double-buffering.

A benefit with compressed fileformats is that you don't have to bother with uncompressing them manually first.

Source for DMS unpacker: http://zakalwe.fi/~shd/foss/xdms/
Disk2FDI: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/ FDI fileformat specification

Floppy connector (2,54mm pitch) as SD-Card connector:

Hackzine using floppy connector (2,54mm pitch) as SD-Card connector (hackzine.com article
SD-Card pinout (pinouts.ru)