Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

---snip--- Hi I'm not saying to make it impossible to do, just that it shouldn't be considered as a primary purpose. Using an extendable language like I've suggested, one can add such features. Part of the problem is that when someone creates the archive, they may not even know the file structure of the disk. I would expect the specification to be broad enough to allow such. Still, the primary thing is to be able to recreate the original material. To me this means that any input to some emulator may mean that it requires some post processing. How would one know what some some format a particular emulator wanted? How would a person always know how to read the directory structure and be able to extract files? If one wanted to work in all cases, I'd expect that the person writing the emulator would provide the needed post processing to extract such information. Otherwise, they'd only be able to read archives of disk that were specifically created for their system. Those archives that the person didn't know the file structure would be useless unless. Such things are secondary functions. They shouldn't be restricted be to capture the entire information in as close to the original format as possible. Creating post processors could easily be done as a separate outside function for special purposes. Dwight