Well, there are aspects to UEF which I have always felt would be very slick to implement in emulators. For exampleI assume pre-rendering the bitmap is because inside B-Em, with Allegro, there is limited GUI support. Would the answer be to move this into a companion application that is built with an traditional GUI toolkit like Qt or GTK+?
- automatically reconfigure emulator based on machine type (that's chunk &5), e.g. prefer Master 128 emulation over Model B
- automatically load required ROMs (ROM hint, chunk &8)
- display short title in emulator title bar (short title, chunk &9)
- eliminate screen borders for games that only use part of the screen (visible area, chunk &10)
- exploit position markers (chunk &120) within UEF to skip directly to desired CFS file (for e.g. compilation tapes, magazine cassettes -- my tibetuef.php generator can use these to record timestamps already)
- choose a tape from a multi-tape set (chunks &130 and &131) where multiple tapes exist within a single UEF (think multi-tape compilations like Beau-Jolly's Computer Hits series)
- flip a tape over, for UEFs that contain both sides of a tape (start of tape side, chunk &131)
Other chunks which it would be nice to integrate into emulators would include
- show game instructions within emulator (chunk &1)
- show game inlay scan within emulator (chunk &3)
It is important to note that some of these chunks are context-sensitive, and some may appear more than once. For example, inlay scans might be broken up into multiple images, entailing multiple chunks &3. Or, Side A of a tape might be for the Model B, and Side B might be for the Master 128. In this case you have chunk &130 to define the tape set ("this tape contains side A + side B"), two instances of chunk &131 to denote the starts of the two tape sides, and two instances of chunk &5 to denote the machine type for each of those sides.
Based on the above, you could do something daft like collect all of the Repton games into a single UEF. The user would be able to pick which game they wanted from the tape set, be shown the appropriate instructions and inlay scan, have the emulator configure its screen borders appropriately, be able to pick Repton 3's editor rather than the game proper, and so on.
There's a lot of richness available here and I don't know what the best way to implement this interface in an emulator looks like. I had thought that just listing all the chunks in order would be a fair starting point, but Allegro sure doesn't make it easy.
Note that TOH handles all of this metadata already, and superficially validates most of it, too.
Statistics: Posted by Diminished — Fri Apr 04, 2025 4:34 pm