HFEv3 support

[RetroD]

Hello, and first of all thank you Keirf for whar you have created.
I couldn't find any confirmation of this, but is hfe version3 supported for creating a disk image from a real floppy?

I tried dumping a hfe of an amiga original game directly with gw and tested in my gotek, but the game is not loading.

I could create a scp in gw and then use Hxc to convert the scp to hfe v3, and that read fine on my gotek.

I noticed also a file size difference between the direct hfe dump from gw (about 2.00 MB) compared to the scp to hfev3 export by HxC ( about 2.4 MB)

The game I tested is Mortal Kombat, which has copy protection.

Is gw outputting hfev1, and is there a way to dump a hf3v3 directly?

[keirf]

To create an HFEv3 you need to specify version 3 explicitly. For example:

gw convert name.scp name.hfe::version=3

However, the gw converter is not very good at converting raw dumps to HFEv3, as it gets thrown off by the random noise and generates too many rate-change opcodes in the HFEv3 output. So your mileage may vary! Seems like HxC may be better for conversion of raw dumps. However what gw is good at is converting clean images (specifically IPF image files) to HFEv3.

gw convert name.ipf name.hfe::version=3

That said, if you have a dump you can share which is working with HxC but not with gw, I'm happy to take a look and see if I can get well-behaved raw dumps converting for you. I'm sure there are some simple heuristics I could try out.

[RetroD]

Thank you for the quick reply!
I have not tried using the convert command as I wanted to see if I could dump a working HFEv3 directly from an original copy protected floppy. (so I could do the dump in 1 pass rather than dump to scp and then convert)

I have tried this command:
gw read Floppies\MK_1.hfe::version=3::bitrate=250

This gave me an error at the end of the dump:
HFEv3: Track too long to fit in image! Are you trying to convert raw flux (SCP, KF, etc)? If so: Try specifying 'uniform': eg. name.hfe::version=3:uniform (will break variable-rate copy protections such as Copylock) If not: Report a bug.

Next, I tried this:
read Floppies\MK_1.hfe::version=3:uniform::bitrate=250

This created an image, slightly larger than before (2.15MB) but it still did not work in the amiga. I think it fails with the copy protection.

Happy to share my SCP if you wanted to do some experiments. Let me know if this link works for you:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nnu72GdesZyM_ixiF_qwHsyNBK1XlUxU/view?usp=drive_link

[RetroD]

and this is the HFEv3 that I created in HxC by converting the scp. This one works on the amiga:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlxATDEsolcta8r9OUvFgBWzjIRaT4nv/view?usp=drive_link

[keirf]

I will take a look. Indeed the uniform option won't work because Mortal Kombat uses Copylock protection which has a variable-rate protection track.

[RetroD]

I see, thank you for taking a look.
I wonder if this is what is also causing my inability to successfully write back a scp to floppy, But I will open another thread so it doesn't get mixed up with this.

[keirf]

That primarily depends on whether the tracks are all index-aligned. Depends on the disk. Most commercial software is mastered with index-aligned tracks.