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.
Cool, but I'd suggest changing Lee's mapping to put the numbers
first. Text systems often need to display numeric data within the text,
and that's sometimes easier if the numbers come first.
0-9 : 0-9
A-Z : 10-36
_ : 37
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?
Yeah, I'd say just display a box.
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. ;-)
As I said, I think people will really get a kick out of having a DOS
filename format on the Atari 2600. But in addition, some programs may have
different versions and use numbers in the filetype. Like one version of my
sequencer may use SQ1 and a later release may use SQ2. In this case it'll
be a little nicer to have 3 characters.
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.
Kinda seems like more trouble than it's worth to me.
And I don't like the idea of compressing the filenames. I've got extremely
limited RAM and ROM space for my new program. I don't want to have to use
more on that. I figure if a program REALLY needs more space, it can use
compression on its own data (which would be much more effective).
-paul
