The Disk Masher System (.dms) is an often used method on the
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
, to create a
compressed image of a disk (usually
floppy). The disk is read
block-by-block, and thus its data structure is maintained. DMS won approval particularly in the
demo scene and the
Warez scene, since with this tool, disk images could generally be transferred easily with
telecommunication modems to
mailbox
Mailbox may refer to:
* Letter box (also known as a letter plate, letter hole, deed or mail slot), a private receptacle for ''incoming'' mail
* Post box (also known as a drop box), a public receptacle for ''outgoing'' mail
** Pillar box, a fre ...
networks like
FidoNet for efficient distribution.
The DiskMasher format is copyright-protected and has problems storing particular bit sequences due to bugs in the compression algorithm, but was widely used in the pirate and demo scenes. To avoid these issues, a number of other disk compressors were developed that used alternative disk reading and compression methods, for instance, xDM
or
XAD (software).
References
External linksxDMS
- Tool for AmigaOS, MS-DOS and Linux for decompressing DMS files.
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Archive formats