MDenham

Yeah, that's just stupid. The bytecode generated should be system-independent - that's what the VM is for, to provide a substitute for the system (in essence).

I would say that item 1 in your list is probably the least necessary of the four - working off of bytecode, instead of using an interpreter or JIT compiler, is a relatively minor hassle. (It's still nice to have the original source, obviously, both for "how did they do that" and "well, this almost covers what I want... maybe a few little tweaks..." purposes.) That said: while I'd love to try my hand at coming up with a superset of ACS and RTS (and possibly FS) as far as functionality goes, that's probably better left to someone with a better track record of finishing things.

Because, at least for images, there is a standard text-based format for them (PPMs)? Mostly it was a "for the sake of completeness, you could eventually look at an entire text dump of the whole WAD and actually be able to hand-edit it" idea. In other words, intentional stupidity.

Would it be correct to assume that there are no plans at this time to support text-based encodings of data in more traditional binary formats (images and sounds)?

I'm going to take a stab at this and say "for the same reason as a lot of other seemingly redundant information in the original spec", namely, Graf's issues with J2ME in the past. Basically, assume nothing. (Besides, it's entirely possible that someone will end up deciding they want to implement extensions to the syntax or grammar. This would not be a good idea for anyone to do, by the way.)

Which means that as far as EDGE support, it's down to one of two things - either I write a compiler for it into "normal" format (in which case all of the ports will end up indirectly supporting it, whether or not they like it, HA HA) or I write EDGE's parser and support it. I'm open to persuasion as far as which is preferred from other people, including those who are annoyed by the idea or process in the first place.

As far as EDGE goes, I've pointed them to it on their forums, so there should be a response one way or another from them sometime in the next few days, probably in the form of "if someone else is willing to write the parser for it, we'll do it".