https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=ROM_String_Files 2026-05-24T18:34:44Z Revision history for this page on the wiki MediaWiki 1.44.0 https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php?title=ROM_String_Files&diff=52&oldid=prev 2021-06-27T22:05:41Z

<p></p> <p><b>New page</b></p><div>All first-gen WebTV/MSN TV clients store text strings and fragments of HTML used to compose some panels in proprietary file pairs contained in a [[ROMFS]] container. This pair consists of two files with specific extensions: a named &lt;code&gt;.dat&lt;/code&gt; file that stores the actual string data, and a companion &lt;code&gt;.dir&lt;/code&gt; file with the same name as the &lt;code&gt;.dat&lt;/code&gt;, which contains pointers to each string in that file. These file pairs are usually stored under the ROMFS directory &lt;code&gt;/ROM/Local/&lt;/code&gt;, and both files in each pair are either named &lt;code&gt;US&#039;&#039;NNN&#039;&#039;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;WW&#039;&#039;NNN&#039;&#039;&lt;/code&gt; (only seen with [[WebTV for Dreamcast]]), &#039;&#039;NNN&#039;&#039; being a padded number sequence. For simplicity, we will simply refer to the entire format as &#039;&#039;&#039;ROM string files&#039;&#039;&#039;.<br /> <br /> The &lt;code&gt;.dat&lt;/code&gt; files used for ROM string files store strings by simply storing the raw data sequentially, adding a NUL byte to the end of each string. &lt;code&gt;.dir&lt;/code&gt; files store pointers to the start of each string in its corresponding &lt;code&gt;.dat&lt;/code&gt; file as a sequence of packed 32-bit integers in big endian format. The &lt;code&gt;.dir&lt;/code&gt; files are used to properly read the &lt;code&gt;.dat&lt;/code&gt; strings, where they are read from each pointer until a NUL byte is reached.<br /> <br /> == Caveats ==<br /> ROM string files do not have any standard for newlines or any way to specify what newline format is used in a set of strings, and as observed in several WebTV/MSN TV builds, the newline format used can vary between builds/releases and is not guaranteed to be consistent. For example, the WebTV Classic builds and WebTV for Dreamcast usually store line-separated text in ROM string files with the line feed terminator, while the 2.9 MSN TV builds for some reason use carriage return (CR) for line-separated text in its ROM string files.<br /> <br /> Text encoding is also not explicitly defined for strings stored in ROM string files, expecting the WebTV/MSN TV client to use its own set encoding for rendering the text. English WebTV/MSN TV box builds appear to use standard ASCII for ROM strings, while WebTV for Dreamcast uses Shift-JIS encoding for all of its ROM strings.</div>

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