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Last I recall, the “official” Oregon Trail Apple II softlist image had “here lies andy; peperony and cheese”.

Is that finally not the case?

I don't know if Oregon Trail specifically has been redumped, but if it is that won't be the case.

ETA: looks like mcorgtrl from the Clean Cracks list should be virgin.

Yes, we have a clean Oregon Trail dump finally, which makes ME very very happy. That's one of the things that's been missing for a very very long time.

Nice work so far on BletchMAME!

You know one thing that would be great for BletchMAME, is a machine 'profile(s)'. - These are 'recommended' working profiles for a particular machine to work 'out of the box'.

In theory, you can get realtime feedback from MAME and have this properly integrated in the UI. Rather than currently -> if you try and setup a machine you can easily get 'an error' and MAME just closes.

For example; right now if I wanted to run a 486 setup ready to go with the latest/best MAME is able to do, simply running the .exe would give no information, help, nothing. So I would need to hunt around random forums and 'tutorials' and guess my way though setting this up. (-ramsize 16M -hard1 somefile.chd, sound ? video? what else?)

So, with BletchMAME, for example, you could easily have a simple panel that says 'IBM PC 486', its interface would tick items that you might have and or something MAME can setup, ie bios rom and floppy drive and but then easily require other user input for needing a HDD, if no image is selected it will make one. It could have all the best hardware available otherwise ready. It could also link to a mini wiki with screen grabs and instructions to get it working.

CPU - 486
RAM - 16 Meg
VIDEO - (Best video card MAME can currently do)
SOUND - (for PCM, ie Sound Blaster 16)
MIDI (for music in games to sound great, ie MT32 or something etc)
HDD (make a blank one if needed or map to one easily)
FLOPPY
CDROM
NETWORK
etc etc

So all these things are setup and visible by the UI - from the 'profile'. - It would hilite for example if something is missing, ie if the HDD is non existent, it will use chdman to 'make one'. Perhaps later, it can have a folder mapped like dosbox does.
Also things like MIDI, it can map to what ever is best in MAME currently OR even the OS directly, ie windows midi port so I can run my own soft synth.
For floppy(s) you can map to any old disk image from the softlist and/or a real floppy on the host OS or even a 'hot' folder. But not all clunky as it is now.

Profiles could be really cool in this case; Imagine right now, if someone trying to run an AMIGA that is working or 'pretty much' in MAME but has no or little info on what MAME has or is capable of, or are not sure of what is best or even what is actually available.. they would have a classic setup that is ready to go.

Interesting idea.

I do want to improve the experience of "machine setup" - it should be as easy to set up a hard drive for MAME as it is for say, VirtualBox. To me, part of the challenge would be maintenance of the profiles themselves. For instance, it makes sense to prompt people to create a hard drive for the PC driver, but that probably should not be the default for systems like the Apple II, where hard drives were an esoteric luxury.

I will say that I will happily adjust my immediate term development plans given the possibility of engaged help in the process :-)

I believe UAE has this concept; it even IIRC allows user-defined profiles.

And hard disks weren't as esoteric on the Apple II as you think, even back in the day. (Of course, they're pretty much universal now in both emulators and hardware).

Thanks for the info. I suppose UAE is going to have to join MAMEUI, MESS NewUI, VICE and VirtualBox in my list of (for lack of a better term) "sources"

An update - BletchMAME has a menu item for toggling Full Screen Display

nerd4gw, one of the things that I realized is that the hard drive setup story for MAME is utterly terrible. I was poking around and found out that there is not a good way to set up a hard drive from within the MAME UI at all. This is despite the fact that under the hood, the CHD code does support image creation and it is just a question of wiring up the right data to the UI.

I'm curious how you (and others) set up hard drives for MAME. I tried creating a fresh CHD and trying to run it with 'macse', but it didn't get recognized.

There are ready-to-boot hard disk images for the Mac in the software list for around a dozen System versions. Otherwise you have to boot a floppy, partition, format, and install, which is kind of a slog.