Re: [stella] AtariVox EEPROM file format

Subject: Re: [stella] AtariVox EEPROM file format
From: "Eckhard Stolberg" <Eckhard_Stolberg@xxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 22:05:45 +0100

That "elbow room" I mentioned earlier should keep characters from being
represented by more than 6 bits, so 8.3 filenames could have a definitive
maximum byte size.
<<

This would help for programs with hardcoded filenames, since you
know how much space your filename will take and how much space you
have for your save data. But for programs that want to allow the
user to select the filename freely, you'd have to design your data
structure for the worst case where all characters take the maximum
number of bytes. And then the space you gain by compressing the
filename would have to remain unused.


What about a nice compact (not "compressed") 4-character name represented by
24 bits (3 bytes) plus one file type byte for a total of four bytes?  I
think 4 characters is plenty to uniquely identify a file.  Simple, small,
easy to read, easy to display.  Naturally, we'd need to establish a Stella
Filetypes clearinghouse or some sort of governing body to manage the
filetypes... all 256 of them. :)
<<

Short filenames would work well for programs that just want
to provided numbered savestates or something where the filename
is mostly chosen by the program itself. But for Paul's
music sequencer for example most people would probably prefer
to have somewhat descriptive filenames. And for that four
character names might be a bit short.

The filenames mostly exist for the convenience of the users.
If we wanted to get the most out of the saved files, we could
just identify them by their number (there are only 128 blocks
with a fixed length of 128 bytes each), and force the user to
keep track of what data he saved to which block himself on a
piece of paper or something. Then we could use the whole 128
bytes for data.

So what we need is a system that allows the user to easily
identify what he saved to which block, but that still doesn't
waste too much EEPROM space as well as RAM and ROM in the
programs that support the AtariVox.

The scheme that Paul and I were discussing was:

We use one byte per character. the font allows only the following
37 characters: " 0-9 A-Z _ ". "Illegal" characters with higher
numbers should be displayed with an empty box in the file
selection dialogs.

The first three bytes in the EEPROM block are the file type
prefix. Also the MSB in the first byte specifies wether the
block is used (0) or still empty (1).

The next 8 bytes contain the file name, but if any of these
bytes has the MSB set to 1, this means that this is the
last character of the filename, and that the following bytes
will be used for data.

This will allow filenames between 4 and 11 characters. I
think this is a good compromise between EEPROM space,
descriptivenes of the filename and complexity of the
support code.


Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg



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