Spark
Spark (Acorn Spark compressed archive) is a type of compressed file archive traditionally found on RISC OS systems, with file type DDC (Archive). Created by SparkFS, these archives were often used to transfer data in a form that could be unpacked by the freely redistributable SparkPlug tool.
Format details
The format is an incompatible variant of ARC. The most obvious differences from ARC are that the high bit of the compression method byte is set, and the member file header has an additional 12 bytes, for RISC OS file attributes. Subdirectories are possible, in a way, by storing them as nested Spark archives.
Spark uses a subset of ARC's compression methods, with the same numbering scheme (taking the compression method to be the low 7 bits of the compression byte). It adds one method of its own: #127 "compress", which is just the LZW part of the ARC's #8 compression method (i.e. without RLE).
Software
- nspark - a tool to catalogue and unpack Spark archives (in source code form)
- nomarch v1.3+ can unpack Spark archives.
- RISC OS de-archiver
- [1], [2] → Spark, SparkPlug
- Deark
Sample files
- Many of the files at The Arcade BBS Filebase (ftp)
- E.g. Sprite Picture files → level1
