10 Aug
2004
10 Aug
'04
6:38 p.m.
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:
Specifications are nice, but unless you get the people
who still have the
hardware and software to join in it will get nowhere.
Well, that's part of developing a specification, isn't it? Getting buy-in
is of course critical, which is why I'm going to approach this from the
standpoint of creating an internationally recognized standard that has an
RFC and everything.
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.
Once the standard is in place then people can choose to use it or not. If
not, that's their loss...their archives will have a lesser chance of being
propagated, unless they get a lot of other people to do whatever it is
they're doing.
I would hope that people would see the value in a standard like I am
proposing and use it. It's not my intention to have just another format
that people can choose. No, this will be THE standard.
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).
Exactly. And it's not a matter of luck, but rather a matter of survival.
Do you want the images of YOUR favorite platform to survive into the next
decade/century/millenium? Great, use the standard.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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