Re: [stella] AtariVox EEPROM file format

Subject: Re: [stella] AtariVox EEPROM file format
From: Paul Slocum <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 14:45:06 -0600

Use 7-bit ASCII characters for the names. That way the MSB
of the first byte could be used to mark used file blocks.
If it's 0, the block isused, if it's 1 the block is free.

I would really prefer to reduce the number of characters to just 37. Just letters, numbers, and an underscore. Minimize the amount of ROM used for character data / translation table.


The first to bytes in each block are sued for the file type.
With ther only being 128 blocks available and probably not
that many programs that use the file area in the AtariVox
anyway, two-character file types should be enough to avoid
confusion between different programs.

I'd prefer to use the extra 128 bytes of the 16K to go ahead and have 3 letter extensions.


The filename can be up to 8 characters long (or whatever size
you think would be best). But if you set the MSB in one of
these bytes to 1, it means that the filename ends there and
that the bytes after this byte are used for data.

Okay, that sounds like a reasonable system.


Maybe you are right. We should probably make it mandatory for
a game to allow the user to erase it's high-scores on the
AtariVox. Otherwise scores for the different beta versions of
a game might get mixed. And if the difficulty of the game
still changes, that could be a problem.

Good point.


-paul


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