Hector Martin

So the question is, do you want to go all out and design a format that can be used on cheaper microcontrollers or FPGAs to implement optical disc emulators that interface at an analog level? Or stick to archiving/emulators leave that as extra challenge for someone to do later?

I feel that optical disc emulators of that sort would have a implementation-specific format due to the performance constraints; and trying to constrain a format intended for archival to those limitations would be unnecessarily restrictive.

I think it's important to recognize that the purpose of archival is not to perfectly replicate the original, but to perfectly replicate the *useful information* encoded in the original. I.e. there is no point in storing voxels of atoms.

In that sense, it probably makes more sense to have a standard but *extensible* format that can encode all useful data at a common abstraction level for optical media *and* platform-specific metadata.

Something along the lines of the PNG format and required/optional chunks?

Yes. Honestly, the mistake that all game dump formats make is lack of extensibility. It makes it impossible to fix these problems post facto in a backwards compatible way. Ditch the raw ROM/ISO dumps already, we've known how to make sane file formats for ages now.