WHDLoad GUI is not user friendly

[rsn8887]

EDIT: I should say I love WHDLoad. I bought it before it became freeware, and I have used it with great pleasure on multiple emulators, most recently on my new MiSTer!

But a few annoyances have come up:

The GUI is displayed for a certain amount of time, and then the game automatically starts. So if I take a long time because I try to change a lot of the options and buttons in the GUI, often the game starts while I am adjusting things.

Fix (idea by @Sonninnos): Provide a start game button in the GUI that the user has to press to start the game. I have never heard of a GUI that automatically vanishes on the user while the user might still be adjusting things. It is just bad design. Of course, a keyboard keypress like Return or space should also work, in case the user doesn’t want to select the start game button with their mouse.

The GUI should allow easily changing options via keyboard (F1-F10 for example) in case the user hasn’t plugged in the mouse.

Custom tooltype option problem: Some slaves just display things like “set CUSTOM1 to disable intro” but don’t show a button in the GUI. Also the tooltype option is named CUSTOM instead of Show_Intro or something meaningful. This is also very confusing and user-unfriendly IMO.

I also find the choice to use icon tooltypes for configuration purposes a very ill choice but luckily there’s that tool kgiconload to circumvent that a bit. I suspect that odd choice of options named CUSTOM1 etc might be because of limitations of tooltype options but I am not sure.

[jotd]

The GUI is displayed for a certain amount of time, and then the game automatically starts.

you can set SPLASHDELAY in the tooltypes or general prefs in S:

Custom tooltype option problem: Some slaves just display things like “set CUSTOM1 to disable intro” but don’t show a button in the GUI. Also the tooltype option is named CUSTOM instead of Show_Intro or something meaningful. This is also very confusing and user-unfriendly IMO.

whdload now allows a custom configuration with explicit names (but CUSTOMx still exist as tooltypes). You're talking about old slaves that need updating because this feature didn't exist at the time.

now what I would like to see is keyboard/joystick support at startup when mouse isn't connected. That would be good to select the settings.

[rsn8887]

Also Sonninnos found out that what I requested is already implemented:
“If the option is set to -1 a Start button is added to the window and it remains open until this button has been pressed. The splash window can also be closed by pressing Space, Return, Enter or the fire button on the joystick in port #1.”