I'd love to offer multiple formats, IPS, HFE, APD etc, but don't have the time to create them. As it is, I spend most of my week on this project. To the outside world the project seems reasonably quiet, but the amount of time needed to get you the end result is ridiculous.Many would be very grateful if you could do an hfe release alongside the jfd one.
ADFFS as you probably already know works at a higher level than physical floppy emulation as it's capturing the interaction between ADFS and the game. That means it's only dealing with sector contents and not FM/MFM or any sector header information. IPS, HFE, APD et al all require FM/MFM or flux data so short of imaging floppies directly as those formats the best I could do is attempt to reconstruct the MFM data based on what ADFFS knows about the track/sector layout.
What you have isn't an original Fourth Dimension release as they all have adfs::0 hardcoded into them, it's probably the RPC/SA version which was released by CJE or APDL. I spoke to the author who confirmed they were not involved in any RPC/SA versions.I've always run it from HD (and as viz demonstrated at ABUG on Saturday).Chocks Away also can't be installed or run from a Harddisc
As alluded to in the OP there are multiple versions of many of the Fourth Dimension games and the terms of the approval put very specific restrictions on what can be released. I do not have approval to release any Fourth Dimension/4D titles published by CJE or APDL.
I've long planned to rework the floppy emulation so the image doesn't need to be memory resident. It's mind numbingly complicated though because FileCore isn't re-entrant, meaning ADFFS can't access the HD when it needs too. I think I figured out a way around it earlier this the year, but as I've been concentrating on ADFFS 2.90 for the last year I've not had time to test it.I use ADFFS on the RISC PC to get all the patches, but it's tricky getting it going on RO3.1+A4000 with the way my A4K is set up. Usually due to shortage of RAM.
I do understand your problem, I reworked all my 4MB machines so they start up with no apps and a bare minimum network stack to leave ~2MB. That's fine for me as I only use them for imaging, but for an everyday machine memory its going to be an issue, particularity if you have an updated boot sequence as so many Modules then become RAM based - its why I started working on RO3.20 to get everything back into the ROM and free up ~1.5MB of RAM.
Statistics: Posted by sirbod — Tue Dec 03, 2024 3:19 pm