From: kegs@provalid.com   
      
   In article <5cdb9ecc-d234-4fe0-8d26-ff8de4c4fa5bn@googlegroups.com>,   
   fadden   wrote:   
   >On Saturday, October 29, 2022 at 10:17:38 AM UTC-7, Michael 'AppleWin   
   >Debugger Dev' wrote:   
   >> My gut feeling is that ProDOS didn't really take off in popularity   
   >until well into the 2000's when emulators made it trivial to switch.   
   >   
   >Early emulators assumed all non-nibble disk images were in DOS order,   
   >because that's what the disk transfer utilities available back then   
   >used.   
   >   
   >I suspect that what propelled ProDOS-ordered images was the use of   
   >ShrinkIt to compress disks, and utilities like NuLib that would unpack   
   >them into a ProDOS-ordered file.  When using that approach, you'd need   
   >to use a second utility to reorder the sectors to DOS order so the image   
   >would be accepted by the emulator.  Support for both DOS and ProDOS   
   >ordering in emulators came later, and I don't think any emulators used   
   >auto-detection until CiderPress started doing it (2003).   
   >   
   >The ".2img" format was designed to resolve the ambiguity once and for   
   >all, but it never really took off.   
   >   
   >One of my tests for CiderPress is to run MDC (Multi-Disk Catalog) on a   
   >partial mirror of asimov.  (I occasionally update a copy here:   
   >https://faddensoftware.com/ .)  One could instrument MDC to report the   
   >number of ambiguous / mis-labeled / unrecognizable images there are,   
   >were one sufficiently interested in doing that, but I'm not sure this   
   >discussion is really hampered by a lack of data.  (FWIW, a simple grep   
   >reveals there are 10,411 disk image files with recognizable filesystems   
   >named "*.dsk" in my data set, though some of them are larger than 140KB   
   >and hence unambiguously ProDOS-ordered.)   
      
   Can you describe CiderPress's algorithm for determining sector order of   
   a .dsk file?   
      
   Kent   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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