Test reports
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Test reports
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»To masher or not to masher, that is the question...
DMS2HD revision 1.5 by Andreas Falkenhahn
Nearly any Amiga user is supposed to have DMS archives on his hard disks, CDs or disks. To get use of the contents of the Disk-Masher (DMS) files, you mostly will unarchive the DMS archives back to disk. But this needs time and will lead to more or less intense work as a disk jockey. It was quite more elegant to unarc the DMS archives to hard disk as virtual disks. This is, what DMS2HD promisses. Let's take a look...
The requirements sound quite low: An Amiga with hard disk and OS 2.0 or better. In addition DMS is required (DMS2HD looks for DMS in C:) or optionally the xadmaster.library by Dirk Stoecker. More shouldn't be necessary, according to the manual.
DMS2HD was tested on an A3000 with 36 MB or RAM and a 040/40 processor under CyberGfx 3.x and MUI 3.8.
The first surprise you will see, if you double click the install icon with the mouse: not the Commodore installer is being loaded - the program asks for the NewInstaller, that is also by Andreas Falkenhahn. Even a changing of the default tool doesn't help, because the installer finds a script, which cannot be compiled by it. If you want to use the installation routine anyway, you need to install the NewInstaller additionally. This method of the program author is hardly to understand. It is even harder to understand, if you are able to use the NewInstaller: after an "endless" amount of time (well, it'll be around 15 seconds, starting it the second time takes then 45 seconds...) a nerve requester blocks the use of the NewInstaller and asks for paying the share fee.
At last it starts and the little files are copied to the desired places. But it has been noticed, that the catalogue file isn't copied into the catalog drawer in the DMS2HD directory as announced, but to Locale/Catalogs/deutsch.
After starting DMS2HD for the first time a mountlist is created in Devs: for the use of the ramdrive.device and uses for the creation of a RAM-Disk the included FastRAD.
The program can be used via Workbench or CLI. This is the opinion of the manual. But the reality is different (on my computer).
After double clicking the program icon DMS2HD offers a MUI supported graphical user interface. It should be possible to trigger program actions with menu entries as well as with gadgets. But it wasn't possible with the tested revision to select a DMS source or DMS target with the mentioned methods. Even, if (unfortunately completely undocumented) requester(s) is/are opened and allow a selection of DMS files and target directories, they were being ignored by the program.
Only a manual entry into the reserved fields of the graphical user interface lead to the following selection of the gadget "Unarc", the desired action and the DMS file were really unarchived into the entered target directory.
Sometimes the program complained, if the capitalization was ignored, sometimes DMS2HD ignored this incorrect behaviour.
The unarchive progress wasn't always readable with various fonts. The 100 % became the funny characters of the following screenshot. Strange.
Well, if the GUI doesn't work as promissed, maybe DMS2HD can be used correctly using the CLI.
But the first attempts following the manual using DMS were also disappointing.
Even if DMS2HD reported errors in cooperation with DMS, in the end the comment "Operation was successful!". But it wasn't, because the DMS archive hasn't been unarchived.
In the long time of using DMS could prove its reliablility, so the bugs might not be found in DMS. Anyway, in addition to DMS DMS2HD also supports the xadmaster.library, according to the manual. This library was downloaded from the Aminet and installed. After the installation was complete I changed back to the CLI and started further testing with the additional parameter XADMASTER. The attempts also failded this time. DMS2HD reported a successfull operation and the DMS arhive wasn't unarchived. Strange, the unarchiving worked using the GUI and the xadmaster.library (but in this case only with the manual input of source and target).
Maybe, that the AmigaOS configuration under which DMS2HD was tested wasn't fine for it - but anyway, the conclusion for revision 1.5 is: Not recommendable.
Those who want to unarchive DMS archives as virtual disks to hard disks, should use FmsDisk or similar tools for better.
The mentioned programs in the (mostly) latest revision can be found e.g. in the Aminet under
util/arc/DMS2HD1_5.lha
util/wb/NewInstaller.lha
util/arc/xadmaster.lha
util/arc/dms111.run
disk/misc/fmsdisk.lha
Contacting the program author:
| eMail: | Andreas.Falkenhahn@gmx.de |
| Internet: | http://www.home.pages.de/~Airsoft |
Uwe Pannecke <Uwe.Pannecke@t-online.de>«
