Board:   [fsxNet] BBS Software Development/Support
Subject: RE: New (proposed) door drop file format, for review and discussion
From:    Digital Man(21:1/183)
Date:    Thu Oct 01, 2026 12:29

  Re: RE: New (proposed) door drop file format, for review and discussion
  By: NuSkooler to Digital Man on Thu Oct 01 2026 08:21 am

 > Twas Wednesday, September 30th when Digital Man said...
 >  DM> Seems like feature creep: are there actual hosts (BBSes) and doors that
 >  DM> use those charsets and couldn't be upgraded to UTF-8? Seems unlikely to
 >  DM> me.
 >
 > I know there are quite a few Russian boards that still use other encodings,
 > I don't know a ton about them though.

Right, but I think the whole system (and the user's terminal is expected to) run in that "other encoding" and there's no translation going on (so all CP437 doors, like LORD, TW2002, etc. would look like crap). It seems UTF-8 is the ideal and CP437 is really the one legacy "other encoding" we'd realistically need to support. I'm fine adding more if there's an actual use case, but I'm making this a completionist's goal of defining everything imaginable up front. I originally had FILE_CHARSET=[CP437]/UTF-8 (something like that), and I guess I could revert back to that just for the potential of support other ASCII-compatible file-encodings in the future.

 > Digital Man around Wednesday, September 30th...
 >  DM> AVATAR seems like a blip and not supported by any modern terminals. I
 >  DM> could add a definition, sure, but it just seems like more unused bloat.
 >
 > Same as above, my understanding is there are some, but I haven't seen 'em :)

AVATAR was mainly a (very) minor optimization via a re-encoding of the same terminal control sequences as ANSI plus some Doorway-like physical key reporting, all done terribly. I've added it to the spec anyway.

 > Twas Wednesday, September 30th when Digital Man said...
 >  DM> Due Atari-native boards/doors even use drop files? Have no problem
 >  DM> defining it, but would really want to insure it has a consumer/tester
 >  DM> first.
 >
 > I don't think it's Atari *native* boards, boards are coming aroudn that
 > support these types of things via their terminals/etc. (similar to the sixel
 > swithcharoo)

I've added ATASCII (apparently it's both a character set/encoding and a terminal emulation, like PETSCII) to rev 0.7 as well.

 > On Wednesday, September 30th Digital Man said...
 >  DM> Thanks for *all* the feedback, I'll review and update accordingly. --
 >
 > Hehe, I know there is a lot. Thanks again for putting this out there!

Yeah, happy to. It's long been a stickler of mine that all the drop file formats are "lacking" and aren't extensible in a clearly backward compatible way.

One caveat: nobody should be implemeting this spec yet. I see that ViSiON/3 merged a DROPFILE.INI v0.3 support implementation yesterday. That's very
premature as the community review of the spec has just started. I did rename the default/target drop file (and env var) to DOORDROP.INI in rev 0.7 to avoid any confusion with DROPFILE.### (never heard of it before recently) and reserve the right to make other incompatible changes as the review proceeds. It's still just a proposal.
--
                                            digital man (rob)

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