ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2022 Entry 24th March 2022: Post 2: Amiga DMS - Unarchiving your PD disks. Amiga DMS - Unarchiving your PD disks. I have covered this subject in detail in the past so just check through the index. I was in the throws of unarchiving a VirusFree PD CD and decided to record the process. So here goes. First make sure you have the TOOL named DMS in your C Drawer. The tool comes with a handy DOC that tells you all the commands. If you click DMS with a DOPUS style file manager it also gives you a guide on how to use the TOOL. Next up I tend to copy files I intend de-crunching into RAM so I never destroy a working original. I then make a note of the file. There are two DMS commands of note and that is READ and WRITE. Note that the WRITE command writes to the floppy and the READ command READS the floppy to memory/drive. OK I next fire up the SHELL and type ... DMS WRITE RAM:T/filename.dms and hit return. Note RAM:T is where I have stored the DMS file that I want to unarchive. The floppy drive will kick into gear and the process begins. This is where it gets tricky. Sadly not all disks are the same. Some are Workbench based and some self booting. Also not all disks will work on your A1200. The two disks I show only worked on the Amiga 1.3 machines with the original chip set. In the Workshop I de-crunch on an A4000 and play on an A500. The first disk was a music only disk and the second is a version of Orthello which I played for some time. Way too much time. Let's say a lot of time.. Man is that addictive. Anyhoo there are often thousands of DMS files on a PD CD so expect a long haul. I generally give myself an afternoon of fun A500 time and de-crunch the odd few hundred. If I can get past the games. Do remember to source a copy of DMS and place in your C drawer or the thing wont work. When running pure Amiga and not emulator the DMS is much better than ADF cus they are of a size that is much smaller than ADF and saves you a lot of wasted HD space. There is also a nifty tool on Aminet called DFACE for short which is a GUI driven extractor and handles loads of other files. I did use the emulator today and created a blank DD disk which you can simply keep over-writing. Amiga DMS - Unarchiving your PD disks.

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Last updated 24th March 2022

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