10 Aug
2004
10 Aug
'04
5:36 p.m.
Teo Zenios wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf(a)siconic.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 12:18 AM
Subject: Re: Let's develop an open-source media archive standard
I have an Atari Mega STE, a Commodore 128D with 1541, several Amigas
(but no Amiga 3.5" HD drives, dammit), an Amiga Catweasel, an AMAX-II
and Mac 5.25" external drive, and 68K Macs with 800K and 1.4MB floppy
drives. I have PCs with 5.25" and 3.5" drives that will do any of the
PC-compatible formats. Linux, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, NetBSD, and Win32 OSs
available.
I also have various Alphas, VAXen and PDP-11s with RX02, RX50, RX33,
and RX23 disk drives, as well as the later 2.88MB 3.5" floppy drive.
Add in RS/6000s with their various 3.5" formats ("PC standard" 720K,
1.44MB and 2.88MB, right?) and an Indigo with a known-good Floptical drive.
I don't write code, I don't know doodoo about floppy hardware that I
didn't learn here on CC, and I'm not always real quick to get projects
done, but I'm damned good at beta testing. I can break most anything,
but I can always tell *how* I broke it, and I can usually tell you where
and why it broke.
Long-winded way to say "I wanna help!" :)
Doc
Platforms do not figure into the specification I
have in mind. It would
be a specification. It could then be implemented on whatever platform
anyone cared to. As long as the various applications follow the spec,
images will be able to be stored where ever. Apple ][ users could store
Amiga images if they wanted to.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival
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Specifications are nice, but unless you get the people who still have the
hardware and software to join in it will get nowhere. The problem is getting
the people to follow the standards and image their disks, once the images
have been collected you can do what you want with them and not worry about
the platform they came from. CAPS software uses an Amiga 1200 platform to
get images from the original disks, Commodore 64 users can grab images from
a 1541/1571 drive connected to a PC running DOS connected to the drive with
a xe1541 cable and some software. As far as I know there is no hardware that
can precisely read all of the different disk formats and sizes let alone
deal with all copy protection methods (such as laser hole in the media
itself). You still need the original hardware of the platform it ran on to
get the images.. so you have to get the people of the different platforms
behind you (good luck).