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by ac29 2242 days ago
As far as I know the state of the art is reading and writing the raw magnetic flux to/from a disk with something like this: http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux

This method supports more or less any platform, and images can be made with copy protection in place (for emulators that support it), or copies to new disk media preserving the original copy protection.
1 comments
paulgerhardt 2242 days ago
Kryoflux was the state of the art in 2013 (and is pretty capable for non C64 disks) but their shady legal practices asserting copyright of ripped images[1] makes their images blacklisted by the Internet Archive.

In 2019 a lot of people migrated to FluxEngine [2]. Though there are plenty of alternatives [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/co...

[2] http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html

[3] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...

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amelius 2242 days ago
> asserting copyright of ripped images

I don't think there would be a legal basis here. If I sell a pen, I can't claim ownership of the things people write with it, no matter what EULA I make people sign. The same holds for a Xerox machine. And similarly it holds for a tool to copy bits or flux transitions.

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paulgerhardt 2242 days ago
Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes.

[1] https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt

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snvzz 2241 days ago
It's a shame they're doing this.

But at least, there is hope that fully OSS+OSHW solutions will effectively replace it.

What they're doing is certainly not magic. Warpers existed in the 90s already.

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Brian_K_White 2240 days ago
It doesn't matter if it's legally enforceable.

All that matters is that they tried.

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