High Score storage for Legacy Games

Atari 8-bit

FujiNet now has support to temporarily turn on READ/WRITE mode for specific sectors in disk-based games. This can be used, to store hi-scores for games that do not natively have support for FujiNet, and is of most use on public servers. This feature is available starting with the 2022-10-12 build, 0.5.7eb55adb.

For the Atari 8-bit, it is implemented using three unused bytes in the ATR disk image file format's header:

offset from 0	Description
+ 12	Number of sectors to allow read/write (255 max)
+ 13 and +14	Starting sector number (1-65535)

So for example, the game Jumpman.atr can be made high-score enabled, with the following header:

96 02 80 16  80 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  02 BB 02 01

Where, there are two sectors, starting at 0x02bb (sector 699) which can be marked read-write to store scores.

As of the current implementation this means that:

• The game must reside in an ATR disk image.
• The game can only have one range of sectors marked read-write.

Examples You Can Try

As of October 2022, the apps.irata.online TNFS server, under Atari 8-bit/Games/High Score Enabled/, contains some example game ATR images.

Mount these games as Read-Only. The FujiNet will automatically 'do the right thing' and mount the disk as Read-Write automatically, for the time it takes to write the high scores back to the disk image.

Thomas Cherryhomes posted a video demonstrating this feature with "B.C.'s Quest for Tires" to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOVfPQiFx7c

A website has been created which extracts and displays the current, live high scores from the ATR disk images on web pages. Visit http://scores.irata.online/ to see the #FujiNet High Scores

Here's how to make a High Score writeable ATR example in BASIC