The big focus of this release is enhanced support for MFM and FM encoded disks.
- A huge upgrade to the processing of MFM and FM encoded floppy disks. The Applesauce software previously had a bare bones implementation to support these encodings, but they are now fully featured and integrated into the analysis flow throughout the app. This means that automatic validation/repair/cleanup of MFM and FM encoded disks is now implemented in the Disk Analyzer as well as the ability to view/edit disks at the flux level. The Nibble Stream view can now show the confidence/validity of individual nibbles (by highlighting them in red) just like GCR streams. There are also much more log messages describing issues with disk structure and the detection of many copy protection schemes.
- The MC3470 test has been replaced by new Drive Analog Characteristics. These new tests give much more detailed information about how the read head and amplifier circuit are functioning.
- The programming language Forth used a novel approach to disk storage. No files. It just stored source code directly on disk in 1K chunks known as Forth Blocks or Screens. And depending on what system you were programming, the arrangement of these Forth Block differed from other systems. So, without the original Forth software it can be very difficult to recover this data. A new Forth Blocks tool has been added to the Disk Analyzer (under the Tools menu). This will attempt to find Forth Blocks by automatically determining how they are arranged, screen sizes, sector interleaves, and other esoteric things. It will then let you browse the resulting source code as well as save it to a text file.
- Supports loading Mac disks from .img (raw sectors with no structure) files.
- Added an Eject Disk item to the Tools menu. This will allow you to eject 3.5 disks.
- Flux Imager 3.5 now provides the option to force it to image both sides of a disk even if it is a single-sided disk.
- When saving as a WOZ file, the Fast Imagers will now indicate in the metadata that the disk was created via fast imaging.
- Added ability to edit the apple2_requires metadata from within the Metadata Editor for WOZ files.
- Fixed: Fast Imager 3.5 didn’t reset the block status after stopping a Retry Bad operation.
- Disk Writer 3.5 will now wipe the back side of a disk when writing a single-sided image.
- Fixed: CBMDOS disks with a recursive directory could hang the Disk Analyzer.
- Fixed: When loading WOZ v1 files and then exporting as WOZ v2, it was not generating all WOZ data for updated version (bit rate, etc).
- Fixed: Apple DOS disks that contained no files were not being properly identified as Apple DOS.
- Allow Apple II CP/M disk to be exported in WOZ format.
- Minor cleanup to UX and performance of Go command in Disk Analyzer.
- There is more good stuff that happened in this release, but I did a poor job of writing notes as I worked.