[sebhc] H8D files and labels

Mark Garlanger garlanger at gmail.com
Mon Mar 27 23:38:46 CST 2006


Instead of creating a new format, why don't we leverage an existing
format such as .zip files? I know these disk image files are already
small so compression isn't needed, but zip files also provide CRC
check (CRC32) per file, there is open/free code from infozip
(http://www.info-zip.org/) to handle zip files, it supports comments,
but we can also provide special files inside the zip file for
description, images, etc. An additional advantage is that people using
older software which does not support .zip can use any of the
unzipper's (including Windows XP built-in support) to extract the .h8d
file and use ithat file, the additional information can be read/used
by the user.
Alsoe, once the format is defined, programs using it should ignore any
files it does not know about and be tolerate if any of the expected
support files are missing (short of the actual disk image of course).
This will allow us to update the format, if needed, and still be
backward and forward compatible between the files and any programs
that would use them.

Mark

On 3/27/06, Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net> wrote:
> Dave Dunfield wrote:
> > I seem to have deleted it, but someone was just talking about keeping
> > labels for H8D files...
>
> As I was passively following this thread, I was thinking it was crazy
> that the sum total descriptive information of the disk images is
> contained in the filenames.
>
> Metadata must be kept somehow, and making it part of the disk image
> itself makes the most sense.  In the virtual disk image formats I cooked
> up for my Sol and Wang emulators, I have a fixed block to hold format
> revision, disk format (# tracks, sides, density, etc), plus a fixed
> amount of space for a label.  I regret making the label fixed size, even
> though it is much more than anybody has ever squeezed onto a real disk
> label.
>
>
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