18 May
2005
18 May
'05
7:12 a.m.
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 14:00 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 08:13 -0500, Brian Wheeler
wrote:
Good point. Yeah, the formatting information should probably be
included with every image, but a disk format repository solves alot of
the tedium.
I guess what I was getting at is there should be
a library of standard
types which fully define the format. 1541's look the same 99% of the
time unless half-tracks, fat tracks, or another copy protection scheme
was used. So if there's a library that fully defines what a 1541 _is_,
there's no reason to have that exact definition copied for each disk
archived. Not that it really takes up that much space, but it does make
it more tedious -- do you want to enter the track/sector geometry for
every disk you copy?
Ahh, OK - not a problem at image creation time, *providing* that the
image format includes all the data needed to recreate that disk
*without* the repository. In 30 years time, there's no guarantee that
the repository will be in the same format, or easy to get hold of etc.
so there's a danger that an image will be junk if all it has in it is a
label saying that the source disk was in "Fred's own disk layout"
format.
But yep, a repository could make the UI of any
creation tools cleaner -
but it's a seperate project from the image format itself I think...
Yes.
Personally I think it's achievable, providing we
stick to worrying about
floppies at the moment. Tapes, hard drives, ROM images etc. can come
later - doubtless they'd share some field names, but the structure is
sufficiently* different that it's too much to take on in a first cut.
Tapes are an issue since they're really not a stream of bytes -- there
are tape marks and gaps. The simh virtual tape format seems to be
fairly complete in that respect:
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/docs/simh_magtape.pdf
Brian
*OK, gut feeling it that it's not *that* different
and floppy images are
actually the most complex of the lot. But as someone else has said, it's
too easy to get bogged down when trying to come up with a "do
everything" solution. I can't see that it matters if there ends up being
seperate futurekeep formats for different classes of media.
cheers
Jules