An SCP file is NOT a direct measurement or representative capture of the flux transitions on the media. It's the output of a machine that imperfectly tries to measure them and inserts noise and delays into the data instead.

And not only in a meaningless "not as accurate" sense -- the drive loses exactly the information that's critical to implementing a working copy. That's why you have to sample a track multiple times for the benefit of downstream analysis/RE tools, and why a naive capture can't be written back to a disk to get the same results.

It's not a good situation. A driver reader that *could* measure the actual flux transitions wouldn't have these problems, but we don't have such a device yet.

My point was that a true capture is/should-be possible, but not with the hardware as implemented by Greaseweazel et. al.

[ Willy Wonka puts his head on his fist and looks back and forth excitedly ]

yes, my impression is i'm really ignorant on the subject, or someone is hoping someone is ignorant while sounding smart on their pet-peeve soap box. either answer is perfectly acceptable to me, but that's a pretty good description of what my brain was going through reading all of that

You're aware you can ask questions instead of just pointing and laughing at the ridiculous nerds, right? Is there something you're confused about regarding floppy drives?

who is pointing and laughing? i gave an honest description of how i felt after reading that jumble of words that looked like an answer to something. it read as if it came from ChatGPT. obviously, more than one person was left confused after reading it. clear as mud one might say.

>Is there something you're confused about regarding floppy drives?

after reading all of that, i'm so confused i no longer even know what a floppy drive is or what it was meant to do

This is just bullying. Please stop.

I am happy for you, as it is clear you've never experienced actual bullying.

The Applesauce is at the mercy of the analog board in the drive. Artifacts of the signal processing done there are going to be reflected in the data stream the Applesauce receives from the drive.

A more authentic representation of the flux on the disk could be made by amplifying and sampling the analog waveform straight off the drive heads. A variety of signal processing functions could be applied to that waveform vs. what the electronics on the drive will do.

Yep, I always have wondered why AppleSauce did it the way it did. but TBH I didn't read all of their quite comprehensive documentation...