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Recent firmware activity has centered on the 'Choose Images' functionality. This is a pretty involved user interface, and it touches all aspects of the card. With the choose images screen, you can switch between views of the images on the USB and the CF card, and then which place to mount them in (i.e. in the virtual Disk II vs. the SmartPort slots). It also needs to keep track of current mounted status, etc. There's a lot of stuff to keep track of, so a lot of work is going into making it all make sense on screen!

Hiya David and Rich,

now that the firmware to choose which disk images are selected is progressing, I'd like to stress test it to accommodate worst case scenarios.

I've already mentioned this to David via email, but one such worst case scenario is Alien Mind for the IIGS. The cracked version requires that it's played from 3 3.5" disks (or disk images) PLUS a save game disk, all run from its own custom OS.

How will you be able to swap virtual disks while playing Alien Mind? I foresee this being a problem because you can't enter the classic text based control panel and desk accessories via Alien Mind and if you can only mount 2 disk images on slot 5...the other problem case that comes to mind is GATE, which comes on 2 3.5" disks + a save game disk as well, which plays from its own custom OS that doesn't enable access to the CDA menu either. Again, with 3 disks, how will you be able to swap between them whilst the game is in play?

I think these are the only two problem cases I can think of - any other game only requires 2 disks and even for saved games, you should be able to swap between disks by accessing the classic control panel. Any other problem games (like Space Ace, which comes on 9 disks) can be installed to hard drive or the classic control panel can be accessed as well.

Thanks in advance for being a pain in the butt ;-)

- Alex

alelee wrote:How will you be able to swap virtual disks while playing Alien Mind? I foresee this being a problem because you can't enter the classic text based control panel and desk accessories via Alien Mind and if you can only mount 2 disk images on slot 5...the other problem case that comes to mind is GATE, which comes on 2 3.5" disks + a save game disk as well, which plays from its own custom OS that doesn't enable access to the CDA menu either. Again, with 3 disks, how will you be able to swap between them whilst the game is in play?

For those situations where you 1) can't mount everything beforehand, and 2) you can't break into the firmware to swap disks - there is a capability being developed to do a sort of NMI-style button (or set of buttons) to rotate through disk images. To keep costs down, it probably wont' be much more than a couple of buttons with some mode capabilities (click to insert the next disk, double-click to select drive, dwell to blink an LED to indicate disk image number, etc.) None of this has been committed to any ware, hard or firm. But that's the general idea of how to go about this. The header connections are already on the board, ready for said commitment. The guys know what the use cases are; it's just not solidified how to execute it yet.

Ah well, that's cool then. Happy to hear there'll be something to accommodate this issue :-)

- Alex

With a fresh batch of code over the US holiday weekend... we now have long file name support and other improvements in the file picker arena. I derailed development efforts for a little bit by asking for a screen shot capability so I can take 'pictures' of the firmware screens. This will help in making demos, writing documentation, and so on.

My first use of the function... to demonstrate something I wanted changed. Not a bug exactly, but a usability enhancement. :-) Ignore the garbled text on menu item 2... that's my fault in the screen dump viewer program, since fixed on my end.

Awesome! Look forward to seeing more in progress screen grabs of the options you get to play with!

- Alex