Re: best format for distribution (SHK? DSK? ZIP?)

["Charlie" <charlieDOTd@verEYEzon.net>]

"Ivan X" <ivanxqz@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
C87C9063.1F299%ivanxqz@yahoo.com">news:C87C9063.1F299%ivanxqz@yahoo.com...
> On 8/2/10 11:12 AM, in article
> 9c1f3cae-c871-4fc5-99e3-501fcab2c2f9@t5g2000prd.googlegroups.com, 
> "Toinet"
> <antoine.vignau@laposte.net> wrote:
>
>> We used to other those two options on brutal-deluxe.fr (SHK & 
>> 2MG), we
>> are now focused on the 2MG option only as it is easier to create 
>> and
>> manage once downloaded on an emulator (Sweet16, Ciderpress...) or 
>> an a
>> real machine (MountIt, ImageMaker...)
>
> Ok, thanks (and thanks to all others for responding!)
>
> Since all my software is 8-bit, I think I've decided that for 
> native users
> I'm going to provide .BXY (which incorporates SHK, or SDK if 
> necessary), and
> then for emulator people I will provide disk images: .PO for 140K 
> ProDOS,
> .DSK (DO) for 140K DOS 3.3 or no-DOS, and .HDV (PO) for 800K, as
> appropriate.
>
> So now, for images: Why 2MG? I realize that it has the advantage 
> of
> describing all common image types, but any 140K or 800K disk 
> (DO/PO/NIB/HDV)
> can be reasonably determined by its file suffix. Back in the 90's, 
> Mac OS
> and *nix users often omitted filename extensions so I saw the 
> relevance, but
> I'm not sure I do now that they are de rigeur for any distributed 
> software.
>
> What I like about the straight dump formats (like DO/PO/HDV) is 
> that they're
> elementally simple, every emulator supports them, and you can use 
> any hex
> editor on a host platform as though it were a sector editor (which 
> is much
> more difficult with a header).

The HDV format is not as simple as a PO except in the special case 
where the TOTAL_BLOCKS number in the Volume Directory Header times 
512 is equal to the size of the image.  If you are going to create 
yours this way then there is no problem but a true HDV image is 
expandable and relies on the emulator/image utility to increase the 
file size before writing new data to the image.

Charlie