[Coco] Desired RESET behavior - EEPROM std?

[Mark McDougall]

On 30/01/2016 4:11 PM, RETRO Innovations wrote:

> Now to order the EEPROM.  What size did you prefer?

The bigger the better IMHO. They should all have the same footprint, so 
what you choose should be easy to change if need be.

I was thinking of proposing some type of "standard" for the Coco's use 
of the EEPROM, so that multi-carts can share it.

I was thinking, for example, of a 4-byte tag (eg. "COCO" or "CCEE") at 
the start which denoted that the EEPROM was initialised and conformed to 
the "standard". Anything else would mean either uninitialised or used by 
something else.

What follows then are chunks of game-specific data, with a standard 
header. eg. A 2-byte tag that identifies the game and a 2-byte length. 
Games can then simply search the EEPROM for their own data, and create a 
chunk if not found.

A simple "standard" Coco app could be used for EEPROM maintenance; 
deleting chunks no longer used and "defragging" if required.

I've used similar (albeit slightly more sophisticated) schemes in the 
past for commercial applications.

I'm reserving the "LR" tag! ;)

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"