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.
That sounds good to me. For displaying 11 characters in a line,
most people might want to go with a 3x5 font, where it would be
difficult to make all ASCII characters easily identifiable
anyway. So only using upper case letters and numbers (plus the
underscore) would be enough.
But then we have to agee on how we want to handle "undefined"
characters with an index value above 36. Do we subtract 37
until it fits into our character list? Or do we display it
as a blank or an empty box, like Windows does with characters
that are not available in the selected font? Or what would
you suggest?
I'd prefer to use the extra 128 bytes of the 16K to go ahead and have 3
letter extensions.
I don't think three letter extensions would be really nessessary,
but if you already have come up with a good one for your music
files, I could live with them. ;-)
BTW, since the AtariVox has a mostly unused system settings
area in the staticly allocated part of the EEPROM, I was
wondering if it might be a good idea to use 16 bytes there
to mark all the used blocks in the file area. Do you think
something like that would be helpfull, or would it be just
some unused feature, that needs to be kept in sync by the
games that write to the file area?
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
