Thanks to my multimedia collection hobby I have a ton of CD-ROMs that I need to store efficiently. I’m partial to storing the bare CDs in a very particular type of plastic & cloth CD envelope. But for storing large amounts of CDs, the best method I presently have is simply to stuff them alphabetically into sturdy shoe boxes.

While scavenging someone else’s trove of discarded computer miscellany, I happened upon a box that appears to have the absolute perfect form factor for storing 3.5″ floppy discs:

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Now if only I had something that perfect for the 120mm form factor.

Behold– a printed and bound copy of the Apple QuickTIme specification. It’s okay to be jealous:

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It’s a bit outdated (version 2.2 from April, 1996), but that only adds to its value. I found it at the top of a scrap pile at work. What fortune! I’m certain this would fetch a handsome price on eBay but I am unwilling to part with such a rare jewel. That there are no similar auctions on eBay for the purpose of price comparison is just further evidence of the manual’s rarity.

First off, check out Benjamin Larsson’s new blog: Random thoughts and random numbers. Benjamin is one of the open source community’s resident experts on perceptual audio coding concepts. His blog tracks items toward that end.

When I have time, I have been working on the Hachoir project. I finally contributed a parser for the ultra-fringe Spider-Man BIN format that I discovered a few weeks ago. Hey, it’s a start. As soon as I get the hang of the architecture and Python in general I can picture myself contributing a crazy number of format parsers.

As if I don’t have enough old CD-ROM games to process, I have taken to hunting down entire lots of CD-ROM games on eBay. The strategy is working well as my first lot just arrived. Now I have 50 more games to process for my Multimedia Exploration Journal. I just hope I have the opportunity to process them sometime before a year transpires.

I’m back on the case with a new entry of my Multimedia Exploration Journal. I just processed 10 Sega CD & Saturn titles. It was all quite predictable, save for one new format that I can only generically refer to as the Amazing Spider-Man BIN format based on the extension of the FMV format and the game that it comes from. As with so many multimedia formats, I find this one absolutely fascinating. The reasoning on this is that it’s a neatly chunked FourCC format that has a custom video codec apparently designed to map neatly onto the Sega CD/Genesis video hardware (I still get confused about exactly how the Sega CD extended the Genesis’s video capabilities). The format appears to define tile chunks, tile layouts, and palette RAM in discrete blocks.