Most ADF files are plain images of the Amiga-formatted tracks held on cylinder 0 to 79 of a standard 3.5-inch (89 mm) double-density floppy disk, also called an 880 KiB disk in Amiga terms.
On Linux and NetBSD, which support the most common Amiga filesystems, ADF files can be mounted directly.
Disks with non-standard tracks may be available in ADF format, albeit cracked in order to create a regular AmigaDOS volume.
[1] However, because programmers did not have to use the operating system routines, it was quite normal for games developers to create their own disk formats [2] and also apply many different sorts of copy protection.
[3] As it was, most full-price commercial Amiga games had some form of custom disk format and/or copy protection on them.
For this reason, most commercial Amiga games cannot be stored in ADF files unaltered, but there is an alternative called Interchangeable Preservation Format (IPF) which was specifically designed for this purpose.
The FDI format is publicly documented,[5] and accompanied by open source access tools.