10 Aug
2004
10 Aug
'04
6:41 p.m.
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Ethan Dicks wrote:
These days, of course, XML can serve much the same
function, plus have
the advantage of being printable. You could end up with files that could
never fit on the medium they describe, but unless you are trying to do
100% of your computing on classic platforms with tiny media, that shouldn't
be a problem (and even if you are... you _could_ fit a 1541 description
file on a 1581-compatible floppy, so even the C=64 could create and restore
these files to and from real media, given the right setup).
Keep in mind that the standard I'm proposing is completely human readable.
If it came to it and was necessary, a human could decode the image data.
The idea is that the images will be stored on modern machines with very
large data stores, though the standard will be simple enough to allow any
computer to implement it and, providing they have enough data storage, to
store the images as well.
One suggestion... for the data portion of
sectors/tracks/etc... let's spec
in a run-length encoding scheme so large portions of unused media compress
down really tightly (lots of zeros, or in the case of a real 1541 disc,
lots of hex 0x01s). If it's XMLish, it could look like
'<r="256">01</r>'
or some such.
Totally agreed.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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