F-1

Appendix F

Memory Card File Formats
Introduction
This appendix contains a description of the format of the binary files created by the
2635A Data Bucket. This information is intended to describe the contents in enough
detail to allow someone well versed in a software programming language to use this
information to write software to read and interpret the Data Bucket scan data files. (This
example ;uses the ANSI C Language to examples of decoding and interpreting the file
data. This code can be compiled using the Microsoft C Compiler on an MS-DOS PC or
compatible.)

Data File Format

The data file format consists of two parts: a header, including the Data Bucket
configuration during the time the data was gathered: followed by any scan data collected.

Setup File Format

The setup file format is very similar to the data file format. The only differences are the
byte at offset zero has a value of 0 instead of 1, and there is never any scan data (the file
always ends at offset 729).
The details of the Hydra Data Bucket binary file configuration format are as follows. A
good familiarity with the operation of the Hydra Data Bucket will be necessary to
understand much of the configuration information. For the most part, however, it is not
necessary to understand all of the configuration information to be able to successfully
manipulate the scan data. The references are to compute interface commands in Chapter
4.