Spark

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File Format
Name Spark
Ontology
Extension(s) .spk, .arc

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).

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