Date   : Wed, 13 Aug 1997 19:23:40 +0200
From   : Wouter Scholten <wouters@...>
Subject: Re: bbc diskimages & virtual file system

Robert Schmidt wrote:

> 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.

You could put all that info after the one line needed.

> > (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... :)

That's not the standard notion of intuitive :-)

> > 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.

OK, but still, the inf format is just like a * cat and therefore ought
to be clear to just about any bbc user.

> > 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...

NO! That's exactly my point. It should be inside the emulator, not
outside.

The external format means continually having to start and kill the
emulator.

Wouter