[FrodeSolheim]

Originally Posted by rofl0r

i've read them all, but it doesnt specify the *exact* path. it speaks about "My Documents"

Yes, well I write "(My) Documents" for simplicity, the point is the current user's documents directory whatever it is called

Originally Posted by rofl0r

oh. if its xdg-specific, portability will get a hit. imagine it linked against SDL on a framebuffer-only linux install.
why not simply use a FSUAEDIR environment variable, the current path ($CWD), or a command line argument ? i think the latter would be the nicest.

running fs-uae would yield in: error: please specify path with --path=/my/fsuae-root/.
so you create the directory structure using fs-uae -create-directories /foo/bar, and create a wrapper script to launch it and you're done.

or it asks for a path on first start, and then stores it in ~/.fs-uaerc

note that this i thought experiment about how to make it simpler for anybody to get it to work.

Without XDG configuration, It will still work, but fall back to ~/FS-UAE. Anyway, there is already an argument for this, try the --base-dir.

Originally Posted by rofl0r

hmm, so what is the purpose of the empty menu/list that is displayed when one selects the floppy drive in the gui ?

The floppy image list (items from floppy_image_list_x options) are displayed there. You can set them manually, or using a launcher that will automatically include them. For instance, FS-UAE Launcher does this.

Originally Posted by rofl0r

hmm well, that one will require some to build some gui toolkit first, which is a major PITA for LFS kind of linux systems. to get QT/GTK up and running, you have to compile *dozens* of libraries and be lucky enough that they all work together. i'd prefer if all this functionality could be used from inside the cool SDL gui.

I understand what you want here, but I see FS-UAE rather as an engine, and features which cannot be in a launcher (such as floppy swapping) needs to be in FS-UAE itself. But what can be implemented outside FS-UAE can normally be implemented *faster* and easier outside FS-UAE, which is major consideration.

There is nothing stopping extra functionality to be available in a "cool SDL GUI". For instance, one could create a fullscreen frontend for game or floppy selection, and start FS-UAE seamlessly (which the unreleased FS Game Center does).

In theory, for game selection for instance, you could have an application which looks exactly like FS-UAE (if that is a goal), and starts FS-UAE when you select a game. Many games require a full emulator reset anyway (say an AGA vs OCS game), and merely swapping floppies is not good enough. So the difference between a emulation reset and a program restart can be quite insignificant -even not detectable if one wants to..

There are some advantages to run FS-UAE on demand as well. By restarting the entire program when starting a new game for instance, there is less possibility of a bug in the emulator reset when hardware options are changed, causing game compatibility problems.

This is for instance a screenshot of my other fullscreen launcher, which is based on SDL, OpenGL and Python: http://fengestad.no/fs-game-center/screenshot.png