Kryoflux in ST emulators?

alexh · Post by **alexh** » Tue Aug 16, 2011 6:56 pm

Anyone tried adding the IPF DLL library to Hatari, or STeeM?

http://www.softpres.org/download

rdemming · Post by **rdemming** » Fri Oct 21, 2011 11:45 am

KryoFlux just released the IPF decoding library under the MAME license. Hopefully this makes it easier to add IPF support to the Atari ST emulators.

Robert

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Fri Oct 21, 2011 1:34 pm

Yes this is nice. I hope someone will use this lib to provide IPF support in Steem and Hatari

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Fri Oct 21, 2011 3:44 pm

It's very easy to add support for it. Took just a few hours to add the new FDC class for Emu and it works extremely well.

mr.vince · Post by **mr.vince** » Mon Oct 24, 2011 4:18 pm

Chapeau. Nice to see it's being used for something.

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Sun Feb 12, 2012 2:07 pm

First post here, so, Hi to everybody.

I'd like to start testing of kryoflux dumps in ST emulators. Is there any released emulator with IPf support?

Regards.

DrCoolZic · Post by **DrCoolZic** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 8:54 am

Dio wrote:It's very easy to add support for it. Took just a few hours to add the new FDC class for Emu and it works extremely well.

Would you be able to do it in Steem? This would be great

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 11:19 am

At the moment I don't have time to work on my own emulator, let alone anyone else's

. Understanding the IPF library would be rather a lot easier than understanding STeem, I reckon. It's properly documented and everything.

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Sun Oct 28, 2012 12:28 am

Bump

News about this? Don't we have any st emulator with ipf support yet?

Regards.

Steven Seagal · Post by **Steven Seagal** » Fri Nov 09, 2012 7:33 pm

zerobyzero wrote:Bump

News about this? Don't we have any st emulator with ipf support yet?

Regards.

IPF support will be part of Steem SSE 3.5, and I know Hatari is integrating it too, so don't you worry dude, not yet but soon!

Post by **spiny** » Sun Nov 11, 2012 4:43 pm

hurray

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Sun Nov 11, 2012 5:17 pm

In fact, I already added it to Hatari this summer and it worked succesfully with all the ~200 images I had, except with one game where an error was discovered in the capslibrary that emulates a specific WD1772 command.
As soon as capslibrary is fixed to handle this and no other problem is seen, it will be released for Hatari 1.7

Nicolas

Post by **simonsunnyboy** » Sun Nov 11, 2012 8:48 pm

So if Kyroflux will be working, I wonder why you turned down adding support for the HxC compatible HFE files? Kyroflux with support for copyprotection should be more problematic to emulate.

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Sun Nov 11, 2012 11:12 pm

simonsunnyboy wrote:So if Kyroflux will be working, I wonder why you turned down adding support for the HxC compatible HFE files? Kyroflux with support for copyprotection should be more problematic to emulate.

?
Because kryoflux already support emulating a WD1772 at the bit level, while HxC doesn't ? Are you sure you understand how the disk image are made and what is required to handle them ?
HFE is just a file format, as IPF is. But IPF also comes with the capslibrary to handle these files in an emulator, as far as I know, there's no equivalent library to use in your own program if you want to handle HFE files.

I didn't "turn down adding support" for HFE, I told you it required a huge work to also support the WD1772 that can handle HFE at the bit level (as a real magnetic head would do) and emulate the whole FDC from this bit stream.
The HFE file is only useful per se on real hardware, where you want to replace the bit stream coming from a real floppy drive's head by the bit stream recorded on a different media (usb, sd, ...) and "inject" it into the real drive interface as if it was coming from a real drive.
I you want to use HFE file into an emulator, you need a supplementary layer to interpret the raw bit stream and rebuild all the WD1772 commands/deconding ; this is a lot of work, rather similar to the one I made to rewrite the WD1772 from scratch to use ST/MSA disk image, but with an additional MFM decoding, and I don't have time / don't feel like doing it again to support raw stream.

If HxC provides in the future the necessary WD1772 emulation level to decode HFE file in an emulator, I will look how to add it to Hatari.

Nicolas

Post by **simonsunnyboy** » Mon Nov 12, 2012 4:39 pm

Thanks for the explanation. Such sort of code reuse ofcourse would make perfect sense. I'm looking forward to the changes then

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Mon Nov 12, 2012 11:58 pm

Great news.

Thanks to the programmers

Steven Seagal · Post by **Steven Seagal** » Sat Nov 24, 2012 9:06 am

npomarede wrote:In fact, I already added it to Hatari this summer and it worked succesfully with all the ~200 images I had, except with one game where an error was discovered in the capslibrary that emulates a specific WD1772 command.
As soon as capslibrary is fixed to handle this and no other problem is seen, it will be released for Hatari 1.7

Nicolas

Is this game Lethal Xcess? I must mess with a variable of the emulation to have it loading in Steem.

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Sun Nov 25, 2012 9:58 am

Steven Seagal wrote:
npomarede wrote:In fact, I already added it to Hatari this summer and it worked succesfully with all the ~200 images I had, except with one game where an error was discovered in the capslibrary that emulates a specific WD1772 command.
As soon as capslibrary is fixed to handle this and no other problem is seen, it will be released for Hatari 1.7

Nicolas
Is this game Lethal Xcess? I must mess with a variable of the emulation to have it loading in Steem.

Yes, it's Lethal Xcess, the force int command on index pulse is wrong in caps at the moment. Some measures need to be made on a real WD1772 to implement it completly.

Nicolas

Steven Seagal · Post by **Steven Seagal** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 8:53 am

In the Windows version at least, the library doesn't support writes, which is a bigger issue than just one game. Because of that, there's an annoying alert box popping up ("command A0 not implemented") in many games and Sundog doesn't work.
I can imagine ways to circle around write support in Steem, but not around the popup boxes, and it would be useless work anyway if a next version of CAPSimg directly supports writes.
The best course now seems to release Steem with IPF support as it is, that is as good as the library itself, and count on Steem fanboys to go scream at the Kryoflux forums.

That is, if they have IPF files to play with in the first place.
The same for Lethal Xcess, the game will run when a better version of the library will be released, it's not up to Atari emulators.

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 1:07 pm

Steven Seagal wrote:In the Windows version at least, the library doesn't support writes, which is a bigger issue than just one game. Because of that, there's an annoying alert box popping up ("command A0 not implemented") in many games and Sundog doesn't work.

Linux version of capsimg doesn't support write either, but at least there's no popup window, the atari program will just complain that the disk is write protected.

The best course now seems to release Steem with IPF support as it is, that is as good as the library itself, and count on Steem fanboys to go scream at the Kryoflux forums. That is, if they have IPF files to play with in the first place.

Unfortunatelly, easily finding IPF seems to be a problem so far for end users. There's no centralized archives due to copyrigth reason and if the available IPF games remains at ~300, I'm afraid the format will never get much traction from the ST scene as a viable archive format (this is sad, as Kryoflux provides an open source library, but the IPF creation remains "closed", while on the other end Pasti provides easy image creation for anyone, but no open source library for non windows platforms. Not really a win-win situation regarding archiving and emulating

)

Nicolas

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 12:56 pm

I think it's just a matter of time. ipf will be more and more popular because everybody wants their games preserved in the best posible way.

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 1:02 pm

zerobyzero wrote:I think it's just a matter of time. ipf will be more and more popular because everybody wants their games preserved in the best posible way.

The format will become popular if .IPF files are publicly available. So far the situation on this point is not really clear, disks are archived by the the Kryoflux/SPS team, but they're not made public for copyright reasons.

Nicolas

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 2:18 pm

The same is applicable to Commodore Amiga, wich is the first system to recive ipf files. They were never officially released and today ipf files are quite popular. We have access to ipf files for other systems like zx spectrum or atari st since just a couple of months. That's the reason I think we must be patient.

npomarede · Post by **npomarede** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 2:33 pm

zerobyzero wrote:The same is applicable to Commodore Amiga, wich is the first system to recive ipf files. They were never officially released and today ipf files are quite popular. We have access to ipf files for other systems like zx spectrum or atari st since just a couple of months. That's the reason I think we must be patient.

I don't know if it's a matter of time. If you look at http://www.softpres.org/games&search=&v ... 0&offset=0, the latest addition are from 2.5 years ago, including some Atari ST images. And yet, those existing Atari ST images are not publicly available (except for the people that submitted the original image if I understood clearly the policy).
Maybe more disks were submitted/archived recently, but it's not updated in these pages.

So I don't think it's about being patient, I think SPS don't want to take the risk to distribute copyrighted IPF image.
Maybe this will change, or maybe some other sites could host those file in some countries were legal risk of being sued are less likely to happen so that SPS can't be worried about that.

Nicolas

zerobyzero · Post by **zerobyzero** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:05 pm

Yes, 2.5 years is a lot... for other projects, not much talking about sps

. As far as I know, they never release the images, they are released by the people who own the original games. Is a slow process but they need the extra motivation of knowing that the files are useful for someone. So, we need compatible emulators with ipf. For example, zx spectrum files received an important boost because the release of Spectaculator with added ipf compatibility.

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