Tidying up the GUI with relation to display settings

[antonvaltaz]

WinUAE is, as we all know, absolutely awesome. However it's GUI is also a little confusing, especially with regarding to various display settings - probably because when it was initially developed there were fewer options to configure.

I wonder if it might be possible to rationalise / tidy up the settings which are currently spread across 'Display', 'Filters' and some of the options in 'Miscellaneous'? In many cases it's not entirely clear what different options do, and some of the fairly 'essential' items are mixed in with fairly obscure 'power user' type options which the typical retro Amiga games-player is not likely to need...

[TCD]

Any suggestions how to tidy it up then? Preferably without introducing another panel

[antonvaltaz]

I do have some thoughts.... will get back to you (once I work out what all the options do myself!)

[Toni Wilen]

Pre-emptive comment: anything that mentions basic/advanced GUI option gets instant NO.

[Photon]

One way could be to separate 'type of Amiga setup' from the rest of the options. Some options are tied not to the Amiga-side config, but to interface with the environment it runs on.

ie. I can see different setups for key/mouse mapping, ROM/RAM/chipset/cpu emulation, floppydrives etc, but things like harddrives/harddisk directories, PC-side input drivers, resolution, filter settings are things you very often want to stay the same and not have to re-config when you update WinUAE (and you could keep configs 'portable' between machines... at least in theory)

Basically, keep the settings that you sometimes need to change on-the-fly - and the 'adapt to this machine install' options could be in an external config-panel (like they do in some games to make the config-screens in-game simpler and nicer).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Photon

One way could be to separate 'type of Amiga setup' from the rest of the options. Some options are tied not to the Amiga-side config, but to interface with the environment it runs on.

'Display', 'Filter', and 'Misc' are all on the Host side of business. Just thought I mention it Let's just see what antonvaltaz comes up with

[Jimbo]

Even though I don't use it anymore. I always thought it looked tidy and was easy to find what I needed to do.

Cheers

[antonvaltaz]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Pre-emptive comment: anything that mentions basic/advanced GUI option gets instant NO.

I wasn't thinking that in the sense of having two separate GUIs, but I was wondering about something along the lines of having a single tab for 'display' with some of the settings that any WinUAE user is likely to want to use, and then one or two buttons leading to 'pop-out' windows with more 'obscure' settings.

Is that still a NO?

@Photon - isn't the separation you mention already there in terms of 'Hardware' and 'Host'? Anyways that could get a bit OT in terms of my original post, perhaps a separate thread if we want to discuss that?

[Toni Wilen]

GUI design isn't going to change any time soon. It stays page based, no "popups" (except in situations that make sense, like harddrives)

[Toni Wilen]

Also imho settings are perfectly logical:

Misc panel only has direct3d/directdraw selection. Directdraw is legacy PC option only, it will slowly get more and more basic until it disappears completely. Led options are in misc because it is not important enough for display panel and has nothing to do with filters.

Display panel is all display related options that work without filters.

Filter panel has all filtering related options. (due to space reasons it looks ugly)

[Photon]

@antonvaltaz: well, what says the setting that you want to change is a 'non obscure' one? The setting that fixes the problem or enables the enhancement is the one you will need to change.

There is one category of settings that you will never have to change from the same 'winuae.exe', so to speak: settings for the environment/platform (where the sound should go, what resolution your screen supports/looks best, which codes you have installed, which folder you have your WHDload games in, the mapping of the CF-card unit, paths to ROMs (? maybe not) etc etc.

Host and Hardware are not separated from the GUI. It's still in there among all the other settings, and they're never changed. There's a copy of these identical platform settings in every config. I was suggesting to have a 'winuae' config and the only settings left in the GUI is 'Amiga' settings - the different Amiga configurations.

Like for some PC game, you get a dialog on install where you select soundcard and video drivers and modes and which joystick to use, and then in-game there's also a config but much simpler and easy to find things in.


It's up to Toni to decide if the ease of configuring, and perhaps also reduction in variables when bugsearching a config-problem, is worth the split-up. But it could probably halve the number of panels and settings in the front-end.

(I guess a quick and dirty fix is putting a boolean property of each setting and panel, and either make an external GUI-copy that only shows PC settings, or a toggle in the GUI WinUAE has now.)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Photon

Host and Hardware are not separated from the GUI. It's still in there among all the other settings, and they're never changed. There's a copy of these identical platform settings in every config. I was suggesting to have a 'winuae' config and the only settings left in the GUI is 'Amiga' settings - the different Amiga configurations.

Have you ever clicked on 'Hardware' and 'Host' itself? Do you use a default config?

[Photon]

Well, hm. I didn't mean that Hardware or Host are 'two settings' in the GUI. It's the Host settings that are 'never' changed, but it's the 'Amiga settings' that you want to change when you load a config, you rarely want to change soundcard between an 'A500' config and an 'A3000' config, and you don't want to change all your configs when you insert a different joypad in the usb or the CF-reader changes driveletter, which today could be the case.

I thought separating the PC side settings would ease upgrading woes and save bugsearching when someone installs it on a new computer. As it is now for the most part you have to start from scratch and create a config (re-entering the HDDirectory paths, filter settings etc) when you upgrade to *really* be sure you're not causing trouble in a new WinUAE with an old, carefully created config.

If the PC-side settings were separated into a 'separate init file' (using a GUI of choice to set the settings, even as mentioned a toggle switch and using the existing one), only the Amiga-side settings would be in the configs which we select to change behavior for certain Amiga hardware or software.

With a few exceptions (HDDirectories 'should' be in init file and input mappings in configs for example) the Host tree could be in 1 init file and the Hardware tree in individual Config files. Halving the number of settings in the WinUAE GUI.

Just suggested something that could be worth Toni's while to implement instead of (as he said he won't) go into each tree leaf and make simple and advanced panels etc. A general categorization that could perhaps be done with lesser code changes instead of a lot of individual categorization and manual GUI-element-creation work. I don't know if that's possible. It's up to Toni to decide if the idea has merit.

[TCD]

Dude, another wall of text and I'm quite sure you still haven't clicked on the two root entries. You'll see that you can save individual hardware and host configs. If you create a 'default.uae' with your host settings and then only use hardware subset configs (or quickstarts), you get exactly what you describe.

[Photon]

Well, here's a summary:

1. simplify WinUAE GUI, how? 2. Remove or hide unnecessary settings, how? 3. Remove or hide the settings that do not vary with .cfg files, how? (simple/advanced toggles in each settings-tree leaf was suggested by anton, Toni said no way.) 4. host settings only change when host changes. alter settings in host-settings-file, in a removed or hidden GUI either in winuae hidden toggle panel, or external.

If some remaining settings like keybinds and HDDirectory (mentioned) etc are put in the half where the user needs to change them, this would save some headache (for users and maybe Toni too) figuring out which of the overlapping (could be overlapping anyway) chain of .uae files should be changed in order to work with a new WinUAE version/work with the new thing you want to do.

PC stuff changes, update a single host-config. A game needs cycle-exact off, half the size of the settings-tree, no need for host configurations in configuration panel, paths etc can also be in the 'host' half of the settings. A lot less Amiga-side settings.

Most of the settings are already sorted into the two halves, and there's a need for almost all of them. So simplify in other ways are hard. You can simplify f.ex. CPU/chipset cycle-exact and similar settings into 'modes' since some settings are mutually inclusive, but I don't see a lot of other ways to bunch/simplify them for ease of use, Toni might. So what remains is removing/hiding, and possibly luxurious intuitive representation of them, but I think Toni will say no to that.

I also like that each setting is individual and that it says in text/coder-speak what it does. Makes it easier to understand. But yes, there are some options to navigate there (Toni maybe knows the total count )

Another wall of text I guess... well just read the quote then.

[TCD]

I think a tabbed solution could be quite neat :
1. Just quickstart
2. Hardware
3. Host
There are still quite some settings in Host that I want to be able to change on 'runtime' (you know which ), so it would be nice to be able to access them without having to a) start another program/GUI b) manually change the config files. There, my cents on the matter

[cosmicfrog]

Id like to see
CPU/FPU and ChipSet on same pane/page
Rom and Ram on same pane/page
Floppys and Harddrives on the same pane/page

Not thought much about the Host side of things
Like the idea of Tabs TCD

[antonvaltaz]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

GUI design isn't going to change any time soon. It stays page based, no "popups" (except in situations that make sense, like harddrives)

Oh okay, just some idle thoughts. Never mind then...

[Maccara]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Misc panel only has direct3d/directdraw selection. Directdraw is legacy PC option only, it will slowly get more and more basic until it disappears completely.

Please, just keep the directdraw option available (if it's not too much trouble) until I manage to upgrade my OS or implement a workaround myself (ATI + XP64 issue, most likely).

[TCD]

Seems to be a general XP issue (32 bit here). DemonHellraiser had the same issue. Guess that doesn't much, as XP is already not supported anyway...