[sebhc] Disk formats and emulators

[Steven Parker]

Eric says:

>OK, I had three reasons, Steven had 7.  He wins!

Well, just as long as the quality matches the quantity.  :-)

>That is, when you see one, a SIMPLE algorithm can identify them uniquely
>as H8'ish things.

Do have any other suggestions for this besides XML?   I do have XML 
experience, but I really hate using it for binary stuff.

>Some software was recorded in mixed SD/DD formats (most for copy 
>protection),
>and this mixing can't be represented without cues encoded in the data file.

Let's call that number eight.  :-)   Good catch!  I wasn't aware of that 
myself.  Do you know of a specific example of something done that way?

> > (4) ...The SVD format requires 3-4 times as much space,...
>
>Yup.  Another one I'm not really worried about.

Okay, but how big is the archive collection going to eventually be?

> > (6) It's not analagous to the ... tape files (.PID, .tape).
>
>Actually, the .PID and .tape aren't analogous to the Daves' format!

Would you want them to be?  One advantage of the H8 tape format was that it 
was designed to be media-independent.  So you could use it with any type, 
density, speed, etc. of media, although I think it was only practially 
implemented on audio cassettes and paper tape.  So no additional header info 
is needed, and it already has crc built in.

>I'm always open for change.  We should realize, however, that
>Dave S's emulator will be broken relative to a new format.

Whatever format we wind up storing them in, we can provide a convertor 
program to put it back into the "DS" format (execept for the few that cannot 
be represented that way, of course).

Cheers,

- Steven

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