Disk archival techniques

[Randy McLaughlin]

From: "Jules Richardson" <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 9:00 AM


> On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 08:13 -0500, Brian Wheeler wrote:
<snip>
> Personally I think it's achievable, providing we stick to worrying about
> floppies at the moment. Tapes, hard drives, ROM images etc. can come
> later - doubtless they'd share some field names, but the structure is
> sufficiently* different that it's too much to take on in a first cut.
<snip>
> cheers
>
> Jules

For ROM images just a binary (or hex) file is sufficient since there is no 
formatting involved.

The only information needed would be a description of what the heck it is.

If we were smart (a long stretch) we could store it as Intel hex preceded by 
text descriptions (including a short description of the Intel hex format). 
If the ROM is > 64K then a different hex format can be used.

ROMs and card image formats are simple enough that no great thought should 
be wasted on them.

Papertapes generally come in two flavors:  Text or binary, please note hex 
tapes are text files.  The leading and trailing nulls should be stripped but 
the data should be kept the same i.e hex tapes should stay hex and not 
converted to binary.  I have seen people store hex data as binary which 
strips load address data plus with Intel hex it is possible to load 
different segments which gets lost when converted to binary.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com