Date   : Mon, 03 Feb 1997 09:38:39 +0100
From   : Robert Schmidt <rsc@...>
Subject: Re: Disk image formats?

Mike Tomlinson wrote:
> 1) because of the limitations of FAT on the PC, it becomes very
> expensive in terms of disk space to store lots of small files. The
> impact is doubled when one needs to write a separate .inf file for each
> BBC file;

I consider that a theoretical problem only.  Most people will have the 
common sense to store the games in a compressed, archived format (like 
ZIP), unzipping only the games they are interested in at the moment.  
Besides, with the sizes of today's disks (it's now hard to get a new PC 
with a smaller disk that 1.5Gb), the waste is hardly noticeable.
 
> 2) many of the disks I have are compilations of several games on one
> disk with a menu-based loader, and it would be murder to try and
> separate out the individual files.

It's not hard, just relatively time-consuming.  With a good ASCII-text 
extractor (a la "strings" on UNIX), a BBC BASIC to text translator,  
"grep" and a bit of common sense, it's quite easy to put the correct 
files together...

I'm going through lots of Watford DFS disks these days, extracting 
individual games.  I will however, keep offering the original disk 
images on my web/ftp site, for those who enjoy disk menus and 
compilations.
 
> Fine - *if* you have each individual application/game in its original
> format, or on disk without other apps being added in.
> Unfortunately, I don't - which is really why I asked if anyone would be
> interested in disk images, rather then collections of files.

Of course, I don't either - but I'm perfectly happy with disk images... 
:-)  
 
I think the BBC community will be very grateful to you no matter how you 
make the software available - as you say, conversion from disk images is 
no problem at all.  DFFS is currently the only "one-way" format, until 
someone produces another conversion utility (Tom? :) ...
 
> OK, how about if I just zip each disc image without converting it to
> DFFS?  Then the image could be unzipped and converted with whichever
> emulator before use.

Perfect!
 

--
Robert Schmidt <rsc@...       >
Software Developer / Vingmed Sound tel +47 67124237 fax +47 67124355
Private tel +47 22352293 WWW http://www.nvg.unit.no/~rsc

The law forbids both rich and poor to beg, steal and sleep under 
bridges.