Unified Emulator Format - History

History

Before the development of the UEF, archives of Acorn computer software on the World Wide Web had adopted a convention of hosting ZIP archives of the raw files on a tape, each raw file accompanied by a sidecar file, with extension .inf, carrying the load and execution addresses from the file header. The INF convention, described and implemented by Wouter Scholten in bbcim (1995), extends the output format of the *INFO command (Acorn DFS, ADFS) to cover CRCs and the order of files on tape. While it works adequately for storing user files, it does not preserve the baud rate of the recording, precise timing information or the non-standard data streams used in copy protected titles.

In the case of disc-based software, it became increasingly convenient to send a sector dump of the disc instead, and by the time of the UEF's introduction the file extensions .ssd and .dsd were already established for single-sided and double-sided raw images of DFS discs, respectively. Distributed bare or in a ZIP archive, they remain popular on archive sites.

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