RUNNING WINDOWS Commands in FS-UAE (Cant believe i never tried this solution before)

[DisasterIncarna]

So, we all know over on Win-UAE there is the WINLAUNCH command which lets you run windows commands, handy if you want to use up to date programs like FFMPEG or YOUTUBE-DL and have the results available in the emulation environment, nice and quick.

FS-UAE however has lacked this handy feature.... and yet, in a way it did not, it was staring me in the face for years it seems and i never thought about it until reading some of the forum posts by the user @White who has been trying to use various methods to get youtube/video playback working better in old or our not so up to date browsers.

While looking over alternate solutions to White's recent work i ended up using the clipboard to read back text output from YT-DLP as it was downloading, it kidna struck me that both WinUAE and FS-UAE have the ability to constantly watch the clipboard for info.

So, right there, we have it, kinda always had it, just needed a script on the amiga and a batch file on the windows or linux side so i quickly rattled something together that kinda works, still new/crappy, but it works.

Made a simple batch file on the PC which reads the clipboard via powershell, and waits for clipboard text that is prefixed with the text "AMIGACOMMAND:", it just waits/loops if it doesnt find such text, going back to watching the clipboard. once it finds that prefix, it launches whatever comes after "AMIGACOMMAND:" via CMD then goes back into the loop.

The amiga script, simply takes whatever you type as an argument and uses a tool on aminet called CLIP : http://aminet.net/package/util/cli/clip the prefix "AMIGACOMMAND:" is added before your argument and both are inserted into the clipboard, which both emulators now share to the windows side and the batch file kicks into operation due to the required prefix existing.

its a bit ugly atm, but i can run pretty much anything on FS-UAE, aimilar to how we do it on WinUAE via WinLaunch, only this has a sort of script/server element.

I also have a loop/wait part of the amiga script that waits for the windows side to produce some text/output so the amiga can display it, this "often" works, but sometimes nothing is returned and my script just locks up and sits there, i ideally need it to wait a set amount of time while looping then give up and exit the loop.

here tho is an amazingly brief youtube vid showing FS-UAE launching windows commands via clipboard communication and returning some textual output, nothing amazing/fancy, but wth, its something.

[ Show youtube player ]

If anyone has got a better solution for FS-UAE launching stuff im all ears, esp if someone can script better than my mostly blind/amateur attempt here.