MDA

MicroDesign Area (MDA) and MicroDesign Page (MDP) are monochrome raster graphics formats with simple lossless compression used by the MicroDesign family of programs on the Amstrad PCW. MDA represents images of arbitrary size, whereas MDP represents the whole of one of a small set of fixed page sizes, and has a little extra metadata associated with that purpose.

Due to the nature of the Amstrad PCW's display, each pixel in this format should be treated as being twice as tall as it is wide.

The MDA format comes in two related versions: one that was produced/consumed by MicroDesign PCW version 2, and a later one with more compression used by MicroDesign 3.

A few other PCW programs could use images in this format; notably, LocoScript version 4 documents could reference MDA version 3 files.

(FIXME: do these formats have any resemblance to the .DR(?) format used on the Amstrad CPC MicroDesign or MicroDesign Plus?)

Specifications

 * MicroDesign Page (.MDP) & Area (.MDA) File Specifications, Creative Technology, 1992
 * Online HTML version with extra annotations
 * PDF scan of original

Software

 * Netpbm includes the mdatopbm and pbmtomda tools to convert from and to these formats.