Re: Ideas of making C64 emulation easier

According to Martin Brunner <konigjh@xxxxxx>:
...
This made me think of the following idea:
How about having a standard for a setting file where you can specify
settings for the C64 games? Either have it as extra file, or have an all
in one file with the settings and all disc images you need for the game
included.
...
Such a standard would make things much easier, what do you think about?
Is it possible?

I've been thinking the same thing, which is why I decided to peek into
this newsgroup. It would be nice if a user could just double-click on a
desktop icon to launch a C64 game or application, and it would also make
the programs gadget-friendly.

Here are my thoughts on what a standard C64 "bundle" format might look
like:

1. The bundle itself could simply be a zip file. Zip files are well
understood and easy to work with. You could even use some other
extension -- i.e., .c64 instead of .zip -- to make it obvious that it's
a zip with special contents, and so desktop environments would know to
run the emulator instead of a zip program. (There's precedent for
this -- in the Java world, libraries and applications are bundled as
zips, but use the .jar extension and define a certain structure for the
contents.)

2. The zip file would contain disk/tape/cartridge images, icon images,
documentation, and a metadata file which ties it all together.

3. The metadata file could be an XML file (or some such) which
references the available disk images, indicates which disk should be
loaded first, contains information on how to launch the program,
keyboard/joystick mappings, RAM expansion and multi-drive
characteristics, and a variety of other hints. The first thing a
bundle-aware emulator would do is look for this file at a well-known
filename within the zip archive.

I haven't tried the GameBase64 stuff. It looks like it's Windows-only
and I don't have a Windows machine handy.

Along similar lines, I've also been wondering if it would be practical
to have an "auto-warp" feature for emulators like VICE, which would
accelerate the emulation based on certain disk I/O thresholds. This
wouldn't be reasonable for some programs, but bundle metadata could
provide hints about this to save the user from waiting three minutes for
their program to load.

Any thoughts on these ideas?

David

--
David Simmons
http://davidsimmons.com/
"Today is a fine day for science!" -- Dexter
.

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