Re: Ideas for a new A2 site

[jonnosan <jonnosan@gmail.com>]

On Jul 29, 2:27 pm, Alex Lee <ale...@mac.com> wrote:
> If you'd like to help out, I suggest you go play Karateka, Captain
> Goodnight, Airheart, Ultima, Transylvania, take 20 to 30 screen grabs
> for each game, saving each screen grab as a .gif or .png (NOT as a
> JPG...it breaks my heart to see screen grabs saved in JPG, completely
> ruining the quality of image with compression artefacts)...and then
> hang tight for another 12 months or so until I MIGHT be ready to put a
> new site together. But that's asking too much, and would create a lot
> of doubling up for people if they take screen grabs of the same games...
>
> Has anyone got any ideas on creating a database on a comprehensive
> archive of screen grabs?

What would be helpful here is some standard archive format that
allowed for easy transport and machine parsing of everything to do
with a disk image.

For example, a zip archive with the following subdirectories
dsk - one or more dos order dsk images
pic - zero or more screenshots stored as png files
doc - documentation (in any format - eg text files, pdf, html, tif)

along with a text file in the top directory with a standard name and
some structured fields for (e.g.) name of program, publisher, disk
format (e.g. dos 3.3/prodos/other), etc. Sort of like the old
FILE_ID.DIZ from back in the day, but with a bit more formal
structure.