Date   : Wed, 13 Aug 1997 16:28:55 +0200
From   : Robert Schmidt <rsc@...>
Subject: Re: bbc diskimages & virtual file system

Wouter Scholten wrote:
> Ok, but my main point is that there's nothing you could add to the
> disk
> information itself.
> All other relevant data is in the diskimage and that should be handled
> by utilities
> and the emulators.

I was thinking in the lines of comments to the disk image (any known
media faults, for example), title and publisher of the disk, date of
dump, "author" of dump, ...  blahblah like that.  Yes, I'm aware few
utilities would make use of such info, but such a format is potentially
more informative.
 
> (BTW, intuitive means that you quickly see what's meant, not like the
> INI which spells out exactly what is meant. No need for intuition
> there!)

I'm thinking of an intuitive thing as requiring little intuition... :)
 
> But you're not the average user. I presume this fixes problems that
> those downloading
> the programs would have to fix if you didn't (?).

Yes, but I'm not verifying each and every game I've made available. 
Also, I've simply given up getting a number of games to work (I've used
Tom's emulator some, but BeebEm the most), without giving further notice
about this in the archive.  I think most average users would want to
meddle in the inf files after a couple of hours of emulating -
especially, for example, when using BeebEm, which doesn't yet support
writing to disk images.
 
> We could use the 6502em script format for this.
> and a command *VRUN to execute the program, which means CHAIN"ELITE"
> in
> this case.
> The indexfile would not be necessary as this is in the .inf's (NEXT
> name), unless one wants to use tapefiles in diskimages.
> 
> *VCAT lists the files.

Support for 6502Em scripts would be a nice feature in any emulator.  But
shouldn't the listing and launching of such scripts be located more
outside of the emulated BBC itself, for example as a point n'click
interface?  Ah, I guess it doesn't really matter...


--
Robert Schmidt <rsc@...       >
Software Developer / Vingmed Sound tel +47 67124237 fax +47 67124355
Private tel +47 22352293 WWW http://www.nvg.unit.no/~rsc

    jeg lukker et oye og ser halvt
    jeg  lukker begge  og ser  alt            -- seigmen