natt on pcem

<feos> a for new wbx, my personal first interest is pcem
<feos> but I have zero idea how that emu itself works too!
<natt> Isn't pcem blocked behind the whole "what's a game" stuff?
<natt> so long as gameinfo is a hackjob for more than one rom, or the idea of a "hard drive image", i think we're nowhere on pcem
<adelikat> you need a colleciton of gameinfo's?
<natt> I honestly don't know
<feos> natt: yeah also all the insane extra devices it supports, just drives me crazy
<adelikat> I've done some work lately, and I think I could do more to make GameInfo not suck as much
<natt> I need people with practical on the ground experience with jpc-rr who actually TAS stuff to figure out what they need
<natt> feos: Of course, that's going to be the curse with any reasonably general "personal computer" emulator
<feos> I think what we may do for "multiple files composing the overall image" as that multidisc thing
<feos> just have a folder and add all the files into xml
<adelikat> I think we aren't so ready for something so big
<feos> and store diffs separately like sram
<adelikat> we aren't ready for mame either, actually
<feos> yeah
<adelikat> hence the shit way you load it
<feos> we can brainstorm together on how to handle it nicely when the main thing is working, then the solution could be shared by other systems
<feos> now I just need to bet rid of simpler problems
<feos> *get
<adelikat> it's called make RomLoader not suck
<feos> huge task then
<adelikat> given it is the worst single function call in history, it's going to be a challenge
<adelikat> filled with fun things like both recursion and gotos
<feos> natt: we have slamo
<feos> http://tasvideos.org/Movies-691up-749up-893up-RatingY-Obs.html
<feos> also the author of http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/PCem.html and http://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/PCem/DOS.html
<adelikat> he's definitely the most knowledgeable about jpc-rr and the needs of tasing such things
<natt> Well, start talking to these people about how all this crap works.  Do they want the emulator to make them disk images automatically?  Do we support floppies?  Etc etc
<natt> Or don't, a PCEM waterbox is not likely in the near future
<adelikat> ur mom supports floppies
<feos> pcem makes images as a feature, using those images is what we need. but I don't remember what the guide has, and dunno about post-dos era
<feos> the plan is to ship the dos image that's ready for game installation, and host it at tasvideos
<feos> "What you'll need
<feos> A bootable floppy disk image or bootable CD. If you're setting up for DOS or Windows, you can use this modified boot floppy from JPC-rr, it has CD support added and is fully redistributable. Get the disk here"
<natt> Isn't booting from a hard drive faster?
<natt> adelikat: Maybe, but do you want to wait for her at the start of every recorded movie?
<feos> dunno
<natt> I feel like there's a lot of relevant conversation here about what the correct files should look like for various dos games, and whether movies should show the game's install process, blah blah blah, that I don't personally care about
<feos> we won't require movies to include game installation, or os installation
<natt> So what, assuming all you have are the hashes of known good installation disks, a separate verification movie that does the hdd install, and then take that hdd image from one movie to the other?
<feos> we'd either want the taser to use the image(s) we provide, or tell us how they created theirs. then, just like with libtas, we'd demand game installation instructions. that's it. the movie is done after both
<feos> http://tasvideos.org/6225S.html
<feos> hashes of mediums used will of course be required (part of the movie I guess?). but it will be fun to require exact windows msdn images just to let the movie run
<feos> both mame and fs-uae put image diffs (what the game writes to the image) as separate files, so I'd expect pcem to do the same