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Yeah I was using those, but if my goal is to build a UX for creating a completely new HD from scratch, they do not help.

Wasn’t Apple SCHD Setup distributed with their system software?

Maybe go for PC or something less demanding? You can't format in the Mac driver right now, the old SCSI is too inaccurate and I can't use the new one without a cycle-by-cycle 68k.

I suspected Mac might be easier because I suspected (not necessarily with a basis of education) that it might have been better able to handle "hot" swaps. I honestly don't know what happens in DOS if you all of a sudden, mount a SCSI hard drive.

Yeup Bletch, I used a pre-setup HDD for the mac also . I sometimes get lazy because it seems all too hard lol. Which is a shame!

Creating a blank HDD should be simpler for sure and many machines have various quirks, size, setups etc. Also from what R. Belmost said, it might not be the HDD creation itself, but some sort of specific way it needs to be 'installed' so the HDD image might even be ok etc. Hence the user/premade profile idea, but I wonder if you can get mame to extract info also from the driver?

Even more handy would be a way that bletch can read what exactly is wrong/missing with a machine, at least some sort of info. 'ie timing no 100%, sound problems, and even some other details which people would find intereseting', rather than just 'not working' .

But anyway! most machines are going to have the basics like a floppy drive, ram, hdd.. so even hooking these up easily would be handy. - oh yeah, 'swapping' disks/cd's should be much easier too.

There are fine-grained "what's wrong" controls but at this point the Mac drivers are sufficiently farked that I think NOT_WORKING is justified.

I took a look at UAE and at first glance, it reminds me very much of VirtualBox and similar virtual machine setups. Very heavyweight, fine grained configuration, lots of bells and whistles.

I'm struggling to figure out how to create a user experience that combines that approach with the MAMEUI "machine picker" approach without compromising the advantages of both sides. You wouldn't want someone browsing dozens of random arcade games to have to set up a profile for some random Pac Man clone.

Perhaps there should be a tabbed view, one tab being "Machines" and the other being "Profiles"? Right clicking on a machine could have a menu item for "Create Profile From Machine", with richer configuration? BletchMAME could even ensure that images and perhaps even saved state persist across sessions?

I guess my ultimate vision for something like MAME is closer to that tho.

Everything in MAME would be a basic 'template' that you could add to your 'collection' (a profile) and even have multiple copies of with different configurations etc.

an MS Pacman machine would be one thing

a Floppy disk would be another thing

you could even own multiple copies of the same base game cart and choose which one to insert (so that each maintains its own nvram status)

if we're going to have named virtual environments where you can add / remove machines at will and form links between them then such becomes neccessary.

of course, the basic operation could hide that in a lot of cases (eg 'mame pacman' on the commandline could automatically create an environment called pacman, add the machine known as 'pacman' from the machine templates, and basically act exactly as it does now unless you start actively adding / removing other machines from that named environment)

there is always going to be a difficult step between professional, serious software, which is the direction in which MAME is heading, and gimmicky toy software, which is the direction things like RA are trying to pull the scene. Some of the complexity can be hidden by default in some use cases, but it still needs to be there, not locked out as you get with RA.

It has also occurred to me that what I was calling a "profile" is almost what one could call a "session".

I might want to spin up a profile/session (perhaps directly from the machine list or even duplicated from an existing profile), whether it be for that long game of MULE or something else, and if save states are supported, exiting the emulation would persist the save state automatically. When I am done with that profile/session, I would then delete it. This does not preclude more permanent profiles.

I know nothing about RetroArch, but I strongly suspect it is targeted at a different type of user.

Ok, I've gotten a version of BletchMAME rushed out with very crude support for profiles.

The main view is now tabbed, with a Machine List being one tab and a Profile List being another tab. When BletchMAME starts up, it will look through Profile directories (specifiable on the "Paths") menu, looking for XML files that match "*.bletchmameprofile"

Here is an example of profile XML:

<profile machine="coco2b">
	<image tag="ext:fdcv11:wd17xx:0:qd" path="D:\OneOfMyOldDiskFiles.dsk"/>
</profile>

Right now, these profiles do nothing other than specify images that are loaded on startup, but I envision in the future, we could have the following:

• When emulations end, the profiles get updated with the new image list
• Save states specific to the profiles loaded on emulation start and completion
• The ability to right click on a machine a "fresh" profile for that machine
• Administrivia (e.g. - delete, rename etc)

Of course, this is extremely prelimary. Some of the basic stuff (e.g. - persisting column widths on the profile view) are not implemented, but what interests me is getting this in front of people.

I'm making progress on profiles, though the feature is not ready for prime time.

I got the basic "administrivia" of profiles working (e.g. - create, rename, delete), and the basics of a profile tab. You can launch an emulation session from a profile, and the profile has images associated with it, it will run the emulation with those images. What I do not have implemented yet is:
* Reflecting image mount/unmount back onto the profile
* Save state support (e.g. - save states associated with the profile that kick on on startup and shutdown)
* Other bells and whistles (.e.g - configuration of things other than mounted images)

Some screenshots:


Questions/comments/flames welcome