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Just Solve the File Format Problem |
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davidb (23:43 4/11/2012)
pwx (10:20 5/11/2012)
davidb (11:38 14/11/2012)
davidb (22:33 18/11/2012)
davidb (19:39 13/6/2013)
davidb (01:40 18/11/2012)
swirlythingy (11:35 5/11/2012)
davidb (21:29 5/11/2012)
swirlythingy (15:04 6/11/2012)
davidb (21:44 6/11/2012)
qUE (13:41 13/11/2012)
swirlythingy (18:06 13/11/2012)
qUE (02:27 14/11/2012)
swirlythingy (14:01 14/11/2012)
trevj (10:57 6/11/2012)
davidb (01:36 18/11/2012)
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David Boddie |
Message #121391, posted by davidb at 23:43, 4/11/2012 |
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Posts: 147
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Those of you who are involved in documenting and preserving information about file formats might be interested in this ongoing effort:
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page
I've added basic information on some Acorn-specific file formats and will go back to add more later. Those with knowledge of RISC OS file formats are particularly welcome to add to this resource. |
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Philip Webster |
Message #121392, posted by pwx at 10:20, 5/11/2012, in reply to message #121391 |
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I've added basic information on some Acorn-specific file formats and will go back to add more later. Those with knowledge of RISC OS file formats are particularly welcome to add to this resource.
I would love to see info on the Euclid 3D model format. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #121393, posted by swirlythingy at 11:35, 5/11/2012, in reply to message #121391 |
Posts: 460
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Blimey, I see MOD is way up on the list of most wanted pages. I know so much about that format I could probably compose an article from memory! |
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David Boddie |
Message #121397, posted by davidb at 21:29, 5/11/2012, in reply to message #121393 |
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What's stopping you, Martin?!  |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #121402, posted by trevj at 10:57, 6/11/2012, in reply to message #121391 |
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Shouldn't the Replay format be included at File Formats > Electronic File Formats > Video?
Incidentally, Wikipedia's Arm Image Format could do with some more work too. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #121407, posted by swirlythingy at 15:04, 6/11/2012, in reply to message #121397 |
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What's stopping you, Martin?! At the moment? A small mountain of coursework which I'm quite effectively procrastinating over without voluntarily dumping a workload of that scale on top of myself... |
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David Boddie |
Message #121411, posted by davidb at 21:44, 6/11/2012, in reply to message #121407 |
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But writing about Replay would help with that procrastination.  |
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qUE |
Message #121458, posted by qUE at 13:41, 13/11/2012, in reply to message #121393 |
Posts: 187
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Blimey, I see MOD is way up on the list of most wanted pages. I know so much about that format I could probably compose an article from memory! I think you'll find the MOD format on Acorn is just as messy as on the other platforms.
For instance, certain aspects of !WIMPTracker format are different to Acorn Tracker, there's also the base audio frequency differences in players :/ |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #121461, posted by swirlythingy at 18:06, 13/11/2012, in reply to message #121458 |
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I think you'll find the MOD format on Acorn is just as messy as on the other platforms.
For instance, certain aspects of !WIMPTracker format are different to Acorn Tracker, there's also the base audio frequency differences in players :/ I think you'll find there is only one MOD format, on all platforms. Yes, that one format is a mess, but the Archimedes Tracker, Digital Symphony, Desktop Tracker, Coconizer, etc. formats all owe nothing to it apart from inspiration. Digital Symphony was designed to offer a superset of MOD functionality to enable faithful conversion, but again, its format is internally completely different. Most of the others don't even attempt to emulate the behaviour of MOD effects. |
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qUE |
Message #121463, posted by qUE at 02:27, 14/11/2012, in reply to message #121461 |
Posts: 187
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"I think you'll find there is only one MOD format, on all platforms."
God no, it's not even standardised on the system it originated on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file |
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David Boddie |
Message #121465, posted by davidb at 11:38, 14/11/2012, in reply to message #121392 |
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I've added basic information on some Acorn-specific file formats and will go back to add more later. Those with knowledge of RISC OS file formats are particularly welcome to add to this resource.
I would love to see info on the Euclid 3D model format.
Looking briefly at a Euclid file I found, the format to be similar to the Drawfile format in places, which makes sense because I vaguely remember it being described as a kind of 3D version of Draw. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #121467, posted by swirlythingy at 14:01, 14/11/2012, in reply to message #121463 |
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"I think you'll find there is only one MOD format, on all platforms."
God no, it's not even standardised on the system it originated on. Yes, I'm aware of that. (There are some gotchas concerning very early MOD files which even most tracker experts don't know about.) But all MOD files, for example, start with 20 zero-padded bytes containing the name of the song. These are then followed by either 15 or 31 groups of 30 bytes containing sample data, the first 22 bytes of which are the sample names. And so on. Open a MOD file and, say, an Archimedes Tracker file in a hex editor next to each other and you'll see that they aren't anything like the same format as each other, as you were erroneously claiming. |
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David Boddie |
Message #121511, posted by davidb at 01:36, 18/11/2012, in reply to message #121402 |
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I added a couple of links to Replay-related things there. Under "Video container formats", there's a link to the Acorn Replay page, and under "Video stream formats", I've put a link to Moving Blocks.
While I was exploring some old disk images, I also found some Ace Film files, so I linked to a placeholder page for that from the "Unknown" section. Really, it's an animation format rather than a video format, I think. |
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David Boddie |
Message #121512, posted by davidb at 01:40, 18/11/2012, in reply to message #121392 |
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I just started pulling apart some Euclid files. Fortunately, these old formats store data in fairly obvious ways. I'll update the Wiki with some information soon. |
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David Boddie |
Message #121519, posted by davidb at 22:33, 18/11/2012, in reply to message #121465 |
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I've dumped some early notes into a page in the Wiki. I've also started working on a Python module to test working hypotheses. I'll probably upload that somewhere in due course. |
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David Boddie |
Message #122420, posted by davidb at 19:39, 13/6/2013, in reply to message #121519 |
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There's now a RISC OS category page on that Wiki now. If people want to throw details of other RISC OS file formats in there, that would be great.  |
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