I would suggest you instead fix the existing paste functionality to support a longer delay at the end of each line first.
I'm willing to do so, but... is it configurable on a per-driver base? How? (I'm still a newbie at programming for MESS, so more guidance is
very welcome.)
Scraping RAM or VRAM is a terribly ugly kludge and I would push for rejection of patches implementing it on any system in MESS.
Forgive me, but why is that so? It's not obvious to me. As I said in the opening post, this feature is implemented in another MC-1000 emulator and it have been very, very
useful. Editing a BASIC program in a text editor is much more comfortable that doing so in the machine, real or emulated, where I'm restricted to slow typing, one-line editing with slow cursor movement, no cut-and-paste, and so on.
(Don't take me bad. I am fond of the original machine, and programming in it is
fun when you are in the mood to do so. But sometimes I just want to use a few minutes between my other occupations to try or improve a program for the machine to post on
the wiki I set up for it, and doing that the usual way is just too time-comsuming.)
Even with a fully functional pasting feature, it is still "painful" to wait for long seconds (even minutes!) of beep-beep-beep-beep to get a full program in memory. And you don't have it the other way back: You can't (promptly) retrieve a program that you have typed in the machine after you edited it there.
Direct RAM save/load is best done in MESS as a "snapshot" - look at other drivers implementing snapshots for guidance.
Beyond the fact that a snapshot involves a file, it is originated
in the machine. I get the status of the machine and save it so I can resume to that state later. People don't create snapshots outside of the machine. And (I suppose) it's generated in binary format, reflecting the RAM content, so the BASIC program is stored there in tokenized format, not text-only. Still, I can't (easily) use snapshots to insert an all-new program into the machine, and to retreive the source code of a BASIC program originally typed in the machine.
Given that, what is it that makes direct (V)RAM copying/pasting such an un-welcome feature?
