IPF Support

[FPGA64]

well as Devil's advocate. I would argue alot of people who used the Amiga experienced the games as the cracks and not at the orignals !

[akeley]

I had only cracks, seeing as there was no originals in my area, and that's why it would be great to have this option now. Cracktros can be fun but also annoying (maybe not as much as on C64, but still) and sometimes cracking have caused problems in games as well.

[rhester72]

Also it would be an important step towards supporting a real floppy drive. That won't be possible with the current floppy drive implementation on this core.

How would including IPF support improve upon that? The 'magic' is in the IPF library, not the caller. I don't see how it would actually change much if anything at all that would aid in implementation of actual floppy support - quite the opposite.

[SuperFrog]

I had only cracks, seeing as there was no originals in my area, and that's why it would be great to have this option now. Cracktros can be fun but also annoying (maybe not as much as on C64, but still) and sometimes cracking have caused problems in games as well.

I had mix of original games and cracks, mostly strategy games being originals and one platformer. Can you guess which one?

[FPGA64]

I had only cracks, seeing as there was no originals in my area, and that's why it would be great to have this option now. Cracktros can be fun but also annoying (maybe not as much as on C64, but still) and sometimes cracking have caused problems in games as well.

I had mix of original games and cracks, mostly strategy games being originals and one platformer. Can you guess which one?

Something by Team 17 , Super Cat I think it was !

[Caldor]

Also it would be an important step towards supporting a real floppy drive. That won't be possible with the current floppy drive implementation on this core.

How would including IPF support improve upon that? The 'magic' is in the IPF library, not the caller. I don't see how it would actually change much if anything at all that would aid in implementation of actual floppy support - quite the opposite.

Because as it is now, the core does not support reading all the sectors and subsectors of floppy disks, since it does not support doing so in floppy images.

The only reason it is now possible to read Amiga floppy disks on the Raspberry Pi and on a PC is because the emulators with that option also has support for IPF images. WinUAE and AmiBerry had support for IPF more than a year before DrawBridge support was added to them. No emulator without IPF support has DrawBridge support. Of course an emulator could have support for the full datastream of a floppy disk and the floppy controller without IPF support, its just not very likely. IPF support shows that it works.

The biggest stoppoint right now when it comes to IPF support in the Minimig core is the fact that it does not have support for the full datastream of the floppy controller. The floppy controller is simply not fully implemented. Maybe to save logic space on the FPGA or maybe it just has not been a focus and it might be quite advanced to do it. But adding support for IPF images in MiSTer Main wont currently change anything. Except, I guess if the IPF image is just an ADF image converted to IPF, then that might work this way. I doubt it but could be interesting to try.

Rob who developed DrawBridge is already looking into FPGA development and such in attempts to add floppy support to the Minimig core, already got the hardware planned. But unless he or someone else finds a way to complete the floppy controller implementation, the whole thing will be dead in the water.

[breiztiger]

Ipf are not only amiga related as lots of people think

[Malor]

IPF does mean all the manual based copy protection is present and its a pain in the arse. Also means you would have to pay much more attention to the config of the Amiga. No WHDLoad fixes would be present

What I use IPF for most is as a perfect source for WHDLoad recipes; they often require specific release versions, and IPF files generally provide that. I use them to create a new install image, without ever booting from or writing to them.

It seems to me that depending on the SPS DLLs is probably not a good idea. If the read/write code can't be redone easily from the documentation, using WinUAE to create new WHDLoad images is a workaround that should give you a nice clean install, without needing any particular work from the devs.

Create images, lha them up, dump the .lha into a WinUAE transfer dir, copy to Mister transfer dir, unlha to Mister image. Kind of a pain, but it will give you bitperfect runtimes, at least assuming that the recipe author did a good job.

edit: MegaAGS makes most of that work superfluous, however.

[rhester72]

@Malor and the rest is entirely superflous thanks to the efforts of folks on the English Amiga Board. What you're describing was already done long ago and actively maintained/updated as new slaves are released/dumps become available.

[akeley]

WHDLoad is great but it's not the be all end all of Amiga gaming. Aside from the games which do not have its equivalent at all, some installs themselves still have a lot of bugs, and for that adf use is recommended. But adfs can also be problematic, what with different quality cracks, which makes ipf the ultimate format if you want to make certain you're running a 100% bug free version (or at least closest to that ideal).

[Malor]

@Malor and the rest is entirely superflous thanks to the efforts of folks on the English Amiga Board. What you're describing was already done long ago and actively maintained/updated as new slaves are released/dumps become available.

I already referred to MegaAGS, and said that its existence makes working around IPF kind of superfluous.

If you had something else in mind, just handwaving about 'the English Amiga board' doesn't mean anything to anyone but you.

[rhester72]

I already referred to MegaAGS, and said that its existence makes working around IPF kind of superfluous.

If you had something else in mind, just handwaving about 'the English Amiga board' doesn't mean anything to anyone but you.

I was referring to your "gee, wouldn't it be great if we could create WHDs from real disks even if they aren't in IPF format?". It's been done long ago and continues to be updated very regularly.

Since your Google seems broken, I'll help and send you straight to the ready-for-consumers site:

https://gamesnostalgia.com/whdownload

This has, naturally, quite directly benefitted MegaAGS as well, as they are its source.

[Caldor]

Sadly WHDLoad does not work for all games though. Probably never will. Not when they still have not fixed the issues with them at this point.

My main example is the Gold Box games. If you actually try to play them, you will find that they can take a very long time to save the game and what makes it very problematic is that sometimes they never finish saving the game at all, but the game just freezes. I have had a lot of trouble with Shadoworld as well, and there were problems with Cannon Fodder and still is issues with Hero Quest 2. I think Cannon Fodder got fixed, it had a problem loading level 21 I think it was.

[Malor]

I already referred to MegaAGS, and said that its existence makes working around IPF kind of superfluous.

If you had something else in mind, just handwaving about 'the English Amiga board' doesn't mean anything to anyone but you.

I was referring to your "gee, wouldn't it be great if we could create WHDs from real disks even if they aren't in IPF format?". It's been done long ago and continues to be updated very regularly.

Since your Google seems broken, I'll help and send you straight to the ready-for-consumers site:

https://gamesnostalgia.com/whdownload

This has, naturally, quite directly benefitted MegaAGS as well, as they are its source.

Yes, well, almost everything has been done before on the Amiga. But a lot of the reason people want to emulate old hardware is so that they can recreate old experiences, including building custom WHDLoad images. I was talking about how I did exactly that, and included the proviso that it wasn't necessary. I was providing a different way to work around the lack of IPF support in Minimig.

You'd do better to sneer a little less, and help a little more.

[rhester72]

You'd do better to sneer a little less, and help a little more.

As irony would have it, that's precisely what I did before you got snippy. I'm quite confident others benefitted, sorry you did not.

[SuperFrog]

Yes, well, almost everything has been done before on the Amiga. But a lot of the reason people want to emulate old hardware is so that they can recreate old experiences, including building custom WHDLoad images. I was talking about how I did exactly that, and included the proviso that it wasn't necessary. I was providing a different way to work around the lack of IPF support in Minimig.

You actually point exactly to why I asked to have IPF support - to recreate old experience. I did not use WHDLoad on Amiga until I started emulating Amiga, and for some reason I dislike packages such as MegaAGS - mostly for 2 reason - never was my experience on real Amiga to load something like that, even I had Amiga with HD back in first half on 90's - and secondly - I don't like too many games installed on my Amiga, because more likely I will not play then any of them, will spend more time just browsing...

IPF support would IMHO be next step for this core.

[Caldor]

Also IPF is more plug and play. Relying on AGS you have to download a whole collection, you might just be looking to play one specific game. You might also even have made your own backup of your own original floppies. I have done this with both by C64 and Amiga.

And as I mentioned earlier, there will always be games that does not work fully with WHDLoad. It does get better and better, but some have not worked due to bugs reported several years ago. Some just have inconsistent freezes and crashes, others have consistent crashes at certain points in the game.

[Malor]

Well, no matter what, IPF is not open source, so it's probably not something the overall project would accept. Someone would need to reverse engineer the format and release the code under an open source license.

[Caldor]

Well, no matter what, IPF is not open source, so it's probably not something the overall project would accept. Someone would need to reverse engineer the format and release the code under an open source license.

Supporting it is possible to do open source. This was already covered. There are solutions for supporting IPF without using that third party driver they have.

[rhester72]

it's possible as caprice forever and sugarbox does for amstrad from scratch

good doc
http://info-coach.fr/atari/documents/_m ... tation.pdf

I took a closer look at this - can't speak for SugarBox because I haven't bothered looking yet, but Caprice Forever absolutely depends on CAPSImg.dll (at least on WIndows).

I think people are getting confused when they see IPF code in source and don't realize that they are only wrapper functions for API calls in the CAPS library itself. There's zero credible evidence to date that _anyone_ has successfully reverse-engineered and reimplemented the closed-source library. (Creating custom IPFs, on the other hand, was done long ago and is very much a thing.)

[breiztiger]

No caprice can read ipf without dll !!! As sugarbox…

I know Fredouille, caprice forever creator and thomas for sugarbox also

If you don’t have dll in emulator directory they booth read ipf with own code

edit : this is from what info are and sources code part from caprice that parse ipf

[Retro-Nerd]

IPF does mean all the manual based copy protection is present and its a pain in the arse. Also means you would have to pay much more attention to the config of the Amiga. No WHDLoad fixes would be present

IPF support would at least get rid of the crappy broken cracks. A lot of the original Amiga games had physical protection only. So, i don't think it would be a pointless effort. Well, "if" somebody could help in any way.

[rhester72]

Not to be mean, but if anyone's interested in implementing this (and has the necessary technical acumen to do so), feature-begging won't be necessary, and if nobody is, it won't help. "Me too!" replies are equally pointless.

[Jingsing]

IPF does mean all the manual based copy protection is present and its a pain in the arse. Also means you would have to pay much more attention to the config of the Amiga. No WHDLoad fixes would be present

IPF support would at least get rid of the crappy broken cracks. A lot of the original Amiga games had physical protection only. So, i don't think it would be a pointless effort. Well, "if" somebody could help in any way.

I agree with the getting rid of crappy broken cracks, I've pretty much switched to only using IPF on WinUAE. If you make installs this format is required.