Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

I haven't read the entire thread on this but I did read Steve Thatcher's idea and it describes about where I was coming out on this myself. I might have missed what the ultimate use of this archive would be. Will the archive be used to (1) re-generate original media; (2) operate with emualtors; (3) both? To ensure integrity of the data I would propose recording the data in the Intel Hex format -- it's text-based and has built-in CRC. Now, we'd have to modify the standard format a bit to accommodate a larger address space and to add some sort of standardized header (a "Hardware Descriptor"). This data would be used by the de-archiver to interpret the stream of data read from the data area (the "Hex Block"). I agree that a multi-layer approach offers the best combination of platform neutrality and portability. I don't really know if we need two or three layers as Steve described to describe the file in a standard fashion. Using an Intel Hex-like format would increase the "de-archiving" time, but in my view it's a fair trade-off. De-archiving software could translate the platform-neutral file into another format better suited for use in emulators. I think that we should start compiling a list of the various media we want represented and how that media is organized natively. I don't mean "well, it has blocks and sectors" either. We should examine the exact format down to the actual numbers (i.e., "2048 blocks of 256-bytes recorded twice"). Seeing how the various data stores are organized should bring some clarity to how we should represent it. Just my $0.02. Rich