Ok, in case you haven’t noticed, I am terrible at keeping this news feed up to date. Development on the Applesauce project has been very active. In the 7 months since version 1.2.0 came out, I have had 16 releases with the most recent being version 1.34. I tend to try to make a release every two weeks. Lots more new features and enhancements are on the way. Here is a quick recap of the changes since my last update (newest changes first):
- Ability to show tracks as Logical Blocks. If Applesauce can determine the operating system, it will translate the sectors into blocks.
- Support for reading the DART disk image format.
- Fixed the date handling when formatting disks.
- The 5.25 Disk Analyzer was getting stuck on dual core machines. Fixed.
- Fixed crash when viewing files on macOS 10.11.
- Applesauce was incorrectly marking extremely sparse ProDOS tree files as being corrupt. Fixed.
- You can now show tracks as Physical Sectors instead of only Nibble Streams in the Disk Editor. Use the pop up menu labeled “Show Track As” at the top of the Disk Editor window.
- Added an “Applesoft BASIC (Condensed)” file viewer. This will show each line with all of the extra spaces removed. This comes in very handy when you want to copy and paste a program into an emulator, but the program has very long lines or uses embedded control characters.
- Viewing Pascal text files now correctly skips the 1K system header.
- Viewing file contents of disk images has been added. Double-click any file in the File System pane of the Disk Analyzer, and a hex dump will be displayed. It can also detokenize Applesoft and Integer BASIC files so that you can view the source code. Viewing of resource forks for Mac and GS/OS is also supported.
- New system for determining where tracks were written on the media surface. It does a better job determining when media shifts to half tracks and such. Interleaved half tracks still not supported, but this is the work to enable that to happen.
- The Apple II variant of CP/M is now supported for file-level verification and analysis. File systems supported: DOS, ProDOS, Pascal, CP/M, and Mac MFS/HFS.
- Better processing of some copy protections that are hiding data sequences within sector gaps.
- Handles tracks that have multiple sectors with identical addresses.
- Fixed issue with validating/exporting some sparse text files from DOS 3.3.
- WOZ files can now be opened in the Disk Analyzer and will undergo disk and file-level validation.
- Improved track looping routines.
- Big improvements to track and sector repair for 5.25 and 3.5 disks.
- Support for some additional copy protection styles.
- Metadata Editor screens for 3.5 disks correctly use Number instead of Side for the Disk metadata.
- Fixed crash when saving some 13-sector Fast Images as WOZ.
- Cleaned up some error logging in the disk Analyzer.
- Lots of additional fixes and cleanup.
- Improved the repair of address fields within the disk analyzer.
- All Bulk Processors will now save a log of their work to your desktop.
- File view wasn’t properly refreshing after making flux edits.
- Fixed detection of corrupted a2r files during load. Will now display an error instead of crashing.
- Fixed issue with client getting confused whith multiple windows being open looking at the same file.
- Very silent 3470s are able to return 0 fluxes to download. This would trigger a code path that wouldn’t save the track and would not step to the next halfphase. If the 3470 went into full clamp mode, then this would cause the client to not read any tracks following the gap.
- Fixed crash for in DOS 3.3 format recognizer for a specific error condition.
- Improved handling of DOS 3.3 sparse files.
- Added “Clear All Folders” to Where menu of imagers.
- The client now has the ability to read and analyze the file structure of many disks. It currently supports DOS 3.2, DOS 3.3, ProDOS, SOS, GS/OS, Pascal, and Macintosh MFS and HFS.
- The Fast Imagers and Disk Analyzer now have an additional save/export option. You can choose “Extract Disk Contents as Files” and it will save the files to a folder for you instead of making a disk image. Very handy if you want to inspect files instead of just playing with them under emulation. It currently does no conversion of the file data, so you won’t be able to look at Applesoft listings and such without using another tool to do the conversion.
- The Disk Analyzer now has a button to view the files on the disk. If the analysis detected any damaged files, the icon for the button will be red to let you know.
- The Fast Imagers will now utilize the file structure recognition in order to give you additional intelligence about the imaging process. For failing disks, it will indicate if any bad sectors are associated with files, or if they can be safely ignored due to being unused.
- Added an “Edit Metadata” button to the Disk Analyzer. This does the equivalent of the “Metadata Inspector for Current Disk” menu command (shift-cmd-m).
- Improved workflow for editing metadata. Several people have been exporting a .woz from the Disk Analyzer and then running it under emulation in order to gather more metadata info. This means that you need to duplicate the new metadata for the .a2r and .woz files. If you use the new “Edit Metadata” button (or the menu equivalent) AFTER you have exported the .woz, then it will bring up the Metadata Inspector for the .woz file. Pressing “update” will update the .woz file on disk as well as the .a2r in the Disk Analyzer. You will need to use the Save menu to save the metadata to the .a2r.
- The Save menu item is now available from the Disk Analyzer. It will currently only be enabled if you change the metadata, but in the near future it will also be used for saving flux-level edits as well as finalized and validated flux streams. Some enhancements to the A2R file spec are coming soon.
- Fixed issue with not properly detecting 13-sector disks that have illegal sync fields.
- Added tooltips to all of the buttons in the main window.
- Cleaned up the Diagnostics screens for 5.25 and 3.5. Added indicators to let you know which tests are currently running.
- Fixes some crashes in the Disk Analyzer.
- Enhancements to sync field repair.
- When loading .dsk images into the Disk Writer or Disk Analyzer, it will check the sector ordering to do the right thing for ProDOS and SOS disks.
- More big improvements to validation, repair, and noise cleanup routines. Support for DOS 3.3P disks has been added.
- Better error messages when attempting to load problematic disk images.
- The functionality of the “Save…” command from Disk Analyzer has been moved to “Export to Disk Image…”.
- DiskCopy 4.2 images can also use the .dc42 file extension in addition to .image. Also supports DC42 images that are smaller than a complete 400K/800K disk.
- Bulk Processor has been cleaned up to more accurately reflect issues in A2R to WOZ conversion.
- More messages logged during the analysis process.
- The “Save & Analyze” button is now the default for the Flux Imagers.
- The Applesauce app is now notarized by Apple before distribution.
- Updated Sparkle library that handles automatic app updating.
As you can see, I’m far more interested in writing code than I am posts about releases. I’ll try to get better at keeping things updated here, but no promises.