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Our demoscene group managed to release only one demo before it fell apart, but these being the early days of the Internet in my country, and me getting lucky with obtaining access to it and creating our own webpage, I published the demo on the net in the most common Amiga floppy archivisation system of the day - Disk Mashing System, DMS, an Amiga shareware program.

The amiga is long gone, the web host is long gone, but last I checked, the Internet Archive still holds the DMS image of our demo. I'd like to take a trip down the memory lane, except the DMS format is dead - currently ADF is the de facto standard of keeping Amiga floppies archived as files, and the emulators can handle that.

How can I convert our demo from DMS to ADF without having an Amiga?

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2 Answers 2

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From some quick research, WinUAE (a popular Amiga emulator) supports reading a DMS file just like an ADF. So you could probably mount it and then save it back as ADF.

Also, according to the ADF Opus tool site, they can read DMS also.

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  • Oh... need to update my WinUAE then! It's been a couple years.
    – SF.
    Apr 19, 2016 at 21:43
  • I downloaded the latest and searched the readme.txt for DMS. Found some references. However, tutorials of old versions show using it.. so I'm not sure why it doesn't work for you. Also I found reference to a tool/library named xDMS.
    – Thraka
    Apr 19, 2016 at 21:49
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    Another option is that the software for the HxC floppy emulator supports reading DMS and reading/writing ADF, so you could use that to convert from DMS to ADF.
    – rcntxtlztn
    Apr 19, 2016 at 22:01
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    FS-UAE supports DMS archives out of the box. But yeah, converting to ADF is easily possible with xdms under Linux or just undms inside AmigaOS from a DMS archive to an empty ADF floppy image. There are most likely also Windows tools available.
    – blubberdiblub
    Apr 19, 2016 at 22:03
  • @blubberdiblub: I'm perfectly fine with Linux tools, thanks :)
    – SF.
    Apr 19, 2016 at 22:15
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The Disk Masher System entry on the Archive Team wiki suggests the following tools:

The linked xDMS page claims...

Supports decompression of files compressed using all known DMS compression modes, including old and obsolete ones, and also encrypted files, for 100% compatibility.

...and it's present in the package repositories of Debian-family Linux distros like Ubuntu, so I installed it and, according to the output xdms prints when run without arguments, you'd want the u or z commands:

     u : Unpack DMS archives to disk images
     z : Unpack to disk images and compress it with gzip

(The description on the page linked for xDMS indicates the formats in question are ADF and ADZ)

As for Ancient Format Decompressor, it says:

  • Disk Masher System a.k.a. DMS

    • Supports all different compression methods (NONE,SIMPLE,QUICK,MEDIUM,DEEP,HEAVY1,HEAVY2)
    • Supports password bypassing

If you just need files out of it, unar (the Linux port the open-source CLI version of The Unarchiver) is included in Debian-family package repositories and lists DMS as supported.

There's also this guide which walks you through how to convert DMS to ADF by running the original DMS utility under emulation.

Unfortunately, a quick search didn't turn up any pre-built binaries outside of the ones in the package repositories so, if you're not on Linux and the emulation solution doesn't work for you, the simplest solution might be to grab a LiveCD image for something like Lubuntu and fire it up in VirtualBox.

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