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I remember the day when Aminet decided to make a new rule. The new rule was that DMS (Disk Masher System) files could not be uploaded. I like DMS files myself, as it makes it easy to extract a trackmode demo or game without hassle to disk. Or even more importantly in these days of emulation, to run it straight from WinUAE just like an ADF file. What do you think of the DMS format and do you still use it?
Always hated them.
Still do.
Don't like any archiving software that restricts you to floppy disks.
The DMS format was a great format. The UK magazine AUi used to use the DMS format to great effect and they sometimes managed to compress and fit quite a few disks onto the two coverdisks each month. I used to love getting that magazine as I knew it's coverdisks would have a lot more content on them that the other magazines.
It is a shame that Aminet did ban the format because, as you say, WinUAE will run the files directly as a disk image, and even on a real Amiga it was a great format for use as a disk archival tool and also great to quickly decompress back to disk.
I do have some program disks and utilities in DMS format that I sometimes run in WinUAE. There are quite a few games somewhere in my collection too that are using DMS.
Don't forget at the time the DMS format was invented, HDs were not available to the normal Amiga user. The DMS format meant people could often fit more than one compressed disk image onto a singe disk for distribution. This was great at the time when floppy disks were not so cheap, as as everyone only had floppy disk drives as storage it was great to receive a disk with more than one actual disk's worth of content on it.Quote:
Originally Posted by TiredOfLife
Harrison
Are you absolutely sure about that?
I seem to remember using lha for a long time before dms.
Also seem to remember having a hd a long time before as well.
So long ago though i can't swear to either of the above.
Amiga Format used to use the DMS quite a lot as well IIRC. Seemed to be fine, you got a few games instead of just the one, and when you got bored of them you formatted the blanks and used them for the next months games.
My first amiga collection I got was on 2 CDs, and they were all in DMS format. A bit annoying was that at that time UAE couldn't run the format, so I had to "unDMS" all the files manually with XDMS. If still anyone needs this one, I'll post it here.
Wasn't it xdms you used to be able to install alongside WinUAE and it would then use it to support DMS files? And then later it became integrated.
That's right. Remember using xDMS myself.
Yes, but you could also use XDMS to extract the adf file from it. With the command line xdms u c:\test.dms, it converts the dms file into an adf file, thus test.adf.Quote:
Wasn't it xdms you used to be able to install alongside WinUAE and it would then use it to support DMS files?