How does WinUAE receive dragged archives?

[Foebane]

I've completed v2.0 of ADLaunch now, with an editable configuration file and a launchpad for WinUAE itself, plus other features!

If anyone's still interested, I'll put the source code for v2.0 in the Zone! later on.

I realise the program is rather niche, but the point is that anyone can modify it for their own use.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

However I see one good solution:

Use "open external application with parameters"
and how you do that in Delphi/Pascal is: shellExecute() which uses ShellApi.

It let's you run an external exe (like Winuae) with a parameter (like the .adf file). Send the whole path of the .adf file and you don't have to copy it to nowhere (maybe use quotation marks if needed).

Just google "delphi shellExecute" and you find plenty of information.

Your program then fires up WinUae with the demo as a parameter and that should work.

Hope that helps.

At the moment, ADLaunch is using ShellExecute to open WinUAE with various configurations, but I still drag and drop the demo archive to the Taskbar.

I thought that if I added the demo archive to the ShellExecute command as a parameter, that a new instance of WinUAE would open each time. Are you telling me that I can use ShellExecute with parameters, and the currently running WinUAE will be used instead of starting a new one? That would be cool beyond belief!

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

Use "open external application with parameters"
and how you do that in Delphi/Pascal is: shellExecute() which uses ShellApi.

It let's you run an external exe (like Winuae) with a parameter (like the .adf file). Send the whole path of the .adf file and you don't have to copy it to nowhere (maybe use quotation marks if needed).

Just google "delphi shellExecute" and you find plenty of information.

Your program then fires up WinUae with the demo as a parameter and that should work.

Hope that helps.

Originally Posted by mrv2k

As NightShft said, it's much easier to run images from the command line. For instance, if you have a standard default config, you can customize it from the command line like this...

winuae64 -f test.uae -s use_gui=no -s nr_floppies=2 -s floppy0=9fingers1.adf -s floppy1type=1 -s floppy1=9fingers2.adf

I've written a frontend that does exactly this. As for drag and drop, you just have to drop a text line of the file path and WinUAE will do the rest.

After having tried my program with drag'n'drop for a while now, I felt it was quite cumbersome with the whole process, and I thought of configurations customised to each demo.

Then I saw how individual parameters could be passed via command line to WinUAE, and after the explanations above, the lightbulb moment came.

So I rewrote huge portions of my program to use command line only, and I have been pleased with the results. What's more, I've been able to automate the correct configuration selection process. I still have the same small set of configurations, but the program can derive the one I want from the demo from the filename, and there I go, a single, searchable list of demos that I can double-click on and launch WinUAE for each one!