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.

Semi-related example, my delta 3d printer converts g-code to a preprocessed internal binary format to avoid runtime trigonometry. In other words, one can pre-process a well-known format to an internal format for performance reasons.

2448 vs 2048 is only a 20% overhead. ?

I mean, the point is you support both the old and new formats, and when games come around where supporting raw ROMs gets too painful (per-gamw hack tables of mappers and such), you tell people to start using less shitty formats for those games to slowly push them.