Talk:Disk Imaging

Stub, please expand!

Disk Imaging is the process of transferring the contents of a physical disk at the file-system layer (ie tracks and sectors) into a file that can be stored on another file system. This is different to simply copying files from one media to another - in which case the storage-format of files are converted from one file system to another.

Disk imaging is typically done to allow emulators to "see" a game disk through its emulated floppy drive as the disk was originally created, rather than strike potential compatibiity issues by accessing the files from an emulated hard disk.

Compatibility issues arise for many emulated machines (not just Atari) when games are presented to them in a non-original format. This is why games for many emulators (such as MAME or WinUAE) are distributed as ROM images or disk images.