On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Steve Thatcher wrote:
> I am not assuming anything about the data. The usual use is to have
> files... in the case of a paper tape emulator system used for CNC, the
> disk structure may not resemble a normal file structure. It still
> contains one or more blocks of data. you can apply whatever name to that
> you want to. The boot sector on a cp/m 8" disk doesn't have a name, but
> it is a block of data that is separate from everything else. Personally,
> I would want to be able to "read" the boot sector and potentially even
> write it back to an image file. It really doesn't make a difference
> whether you access track 0 and sector 1 or a data block inside the image
> file that contains the boot code.
I see what you're saying now. I suppose another potential format that can
be incorporated into the spec is a file-based format, where blocks or
"files" are represented inside the archive. I can see this being useful
for two purposes:
1) Imaging the filesystem from a medium (as opposed to the medium itself)
2) Incorporating code along the lines of what Dwight has been suggesting
that knows how to do special processing of the image it is contained in.
The code can be extracted and poked into memory using a very simple
algorithm that possibly can be described in comments in the image file.
I did suggest that the spec be able to image filesystems in a previous
message. I think this comes close enough to what you are describing. It
can be modified to also be able to indicate "blocks of data". These
blocks could be given an identifier--a name, number, whatever; it doesn't
matter, as long as it's an ASCII-representable string--and then extracted
from the image file as needed.
Does this satisfy you, Steve? :)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 11:39:18 BST