Floppy image types - IMA and VFD

[Caldor]

Someone asked on Facebook to have VFD support added to AO486. I looked into it and found that the core does actually already support it, because its really the same raw format as the already supported IMG format. Which is also the same as the IMA format, unless the IMA is a compressed type.

The tool WinImage is one of the tools that can be used to create VFD and IMA images. I when it creates those images, you get the exact same file, just with two different extensions.

So I looked into these formats some more. VFD seems to have been a Microsoft format, like I think VHD is as well. So you could just rename these files to .img, and they can be mounted as floppies just fine... or you can add them as file extensions that you can mount in AO486, or both.

The change in the core is just adding 6, maybe 12 characters. I already tried it myself.

ao486_vfd.rbf

(4 MiB) Downloaded 128 times

The reason I am making this thread is because I figured it was a no-brainer that this should be added to the core, leaving it up to the user what they want their floppy image types to be... or extension names as it is here. But on the official Discord group I did not really find much support. It was argued you can just rename the files. Which is true. Another argument was that it might be confusing, but its already only one image type supported for floppies, making it 3 is not that different.

So I looked into what emulators and such does. PCem and 86Box, which are both full PC system emulators, I think they even share a lot of source code, they both support all of these image types. In 86Box, it even goes as far as just saying it supports .IM* f.ex., since there are several types. So it could be a lot more image types that got added, because this raw image types seems to have a lot of different extensions.

So I figured I would ask here in the forum? If people want to see these file types being supported, I will make a pull request to have it added to the core.

[akeley]

If it's really trivial, then sure, why not add it. The more the merrier. Figuring out that you have to rename the files is much more confusing than having it actually shown in-core.

I don't think I have any VFDs but quite a few IMAs so it could come handy one day.

[breiztiger]

It’s very useful to not make necessary to rename all your image type

[Caldor]

Okay, I will make a pull request and see if it gets accepted.

[Caldor]

Finally got around to making the pull request:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/pull/112

[Caldor]

It got merged The latest version of AO486 should now support mounting IMA and VFD images. Not sure if its in the latest release yet, but its in the nightly releases at least.