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Psychofox11 »
2024-11-17 17:26:22
We can't really add A78 properly until we agree on a deterministic header format. The headers allow some 'type anything' fields like game name, version, etc. that are not essential to emulation, while NES headers contain ONLY what is essential, meaning 2 people will arrive at the same header. With A78, even an upper/lowercase or spacing issue would keep them from matching.
I've proposed an agreement to simply set all fields not used for emulation to 00, both in forums and on discord, but it has never gotten any traction. Atari Lynx is similar. Without that, headered will be hard to verify.
My understanding is the current a78 aftermarkets are using the headers provided by the devs, including whatever they typed in those fields. Just 'first working header found' - but it is hard to redump/verify that.
Outside of getting the communities to accept a new minimal header format for 7800/Lynx, we'll need to agree on blanking out the unnecessary fields, even if typed by devs. Somewhat similar to how devs typically provide NES with old iNes headers and we updated them to NES 2.0.
If there's something important from the dev in the original header (not for running but just important text), we should still blank it out, and maybe add a comment about it.
Though, my attempts at some consistency with headers on these have failed to gain any traction or agreement, and I've kind of given up that battle. I still support it and would jump in if others want more useable headered dats for these systems and can put in some work to do it! Emulators do sometimes require the headers, and they absolutely necessary for some aftermarkets.
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Atari 7800 - A78 DAT file is empy