also made rainbow islands extra a parent, since it has it's own game code, own c-chip and is generally considered a semi-sequel rather than a bugfix / revision of the original game.
(best I can tell behavior matches the differences between original and extra that were present in the simulation at least, but obviously the real chip could be hiding more secrets)
ASCII.
This has not been done unilaterally - I have the support of @galibert,
@Tafoid, and @rb6502 to do something about the current free-for-all.
The trouble with the ROM label field in MAME is that it serves multiple
competing purposes: it's supposed to identify the device in the original
system, and also act as a filename when searching for media image files
to load. It also has to appear in listings of needed/missing files
(e.g. in cases where the image _isn't_ found).
To identify the original device, the ROM label field in MAME often
contains text derived from some combination of one or more of the text
on a label if present, the silkscreen on an IC package, the location on
the circuit board, and the device designation. There's no standard for
the order in which these appear and how they're separated. Some people
add arbitrary filename extensions and other annotations.
There are practical limitations on what can appear in the string, given
it's used as a filename:
* Path/name length limits.
* Restrictions on characters that can appear in a filename.
* Practicality of using the filename in a command-line environment.
* Ambiguity when describing a filename.
Filesystems themselves typically restrict characters in filenames:
* Windows defines MAX_PATH as 260 characters - longer paths are
difficult to use with Win32 APIs and don't work properly in Windows
Explorer
* Most filesystems don't allow ^@ or the path separator in names.
* Windows doesn't allow C0 control characters or <>:"/\|?* characters in
filenames.
* Filesystems may have collation, e.g. FAT16 is case-folding, NTFS and
HFS+ are case-preserving but case-insensitive, while EXT and XFS are
case-sensitive.
* Filesystems may perform Unicode normalisation, e.g. NTFS forces NFC,
HFS+ forces NFD, while ZFS stores filenames as supplied at creation,
but may be configured to apply normalisation when testing equality.
Shells use various ASCII characters for special purposes:
* C0 control characters for line editing and control (e.g. ^C to cancel
a line, ^V for control charecter escape, ^R for history search).
* The "'\ chracaters for quoting/escaping.
* The ><| characters for redirection.
* The *?[] characters for pattern matching.
* The ${}~ characters for variable substitution/sequence expansion.
* The ! or ^ characters for history substitution.
* The ()` characters for controlling subshells.
* The %& characters for job control.
* The ; character as a command separator.
* The # character for comments.
There's also the issue of whether users across a range of locales will
be able to type/display characters. We still don't have good support
for Unicode console output on Windows (std::wcout doesn't seem to work
properly), many users don't install C/J/K fonts, and many users aren't
comfortable entering text in unfamiliar languages. This means we're
limited to printable ASCII for practical purposes.
The practical limitations mean the subset of "safe" characters is
limited to ASCII digits, either uppercase or lowercase English Latin
(but not both due to collation behaving differently across systems), and
the +,-.=_ punctuation chracters. We've decided on lowercase, digits,
and safe punctuation. In addition to this, spaces are allowed, as they
can be quoted/escaped easily enough if no other special characters are
used.
There have been some arguments that allowing uppercase is "more
accurate", but in practical terms it doesn't add much value. A string
in a C++ program can't represent layout, relative size of text, colour
and shape of the label, text font, graphics, and many other details. It
also does nothing to address labels with text outside the English Latin
alphabet (e.g. labels with Chinese ideographs). Besides missing
information, the lack of hard and fast rules means you need to intuit
what a label string in MAME is trying to represent. There is simply no
substitute for photographs. There wasn't even any consistency in case
within individual machine sets. For example, several games in
vigilant.cpp had inconsistent case for "ic" vs "IC" in designation
suffixes, and ibm6850.cpp had inconsistent case for filename extensions
withing a set. There were sets that used uppercase for text from the
label but not from the part number/PCB location, and vice versa. It was
a huge mess.
There's some merit to the idea of allowing a wider variety of characters
in the label strings in the source, and mapping to a more restricted set
when searching for files. However it creates more issues than it
solves. It would require a change to the XML output to provide both the
label and filename, and a corresponding change to external ROM
management tools. It would be impractical to do for software lists,
because it would require ROM management tools to implement the exact
same mapping algorithm as MAME.
But that aside, actually doing useful mapping would be impractical.
What would you do with C/J/K ideographs, like the chip labelled
東方不敗 (Dongfang Bubai)? There's no intuitive way to do the mapping
wtihout incluing something like Unihan data, which would add a lot of
bloat. Even the, without a language hint the Romanisation would be less
than ideal in many cases (using Chinese reading for Japanese text and
vice versa). There's still the messy issue of filesystem collation to
deal with.
We do allow full Unicode in comments in the source. If you want to
provide a more detailed description of a ROM label, that's the place for
it. You've got more characters available, and the possibility of using
mulitple lines. There are too many other competing requirements on the
label field in the ROM definitions.
* remote488: work started
* remote488: fixed a crash when using socketed bitbangers on Linux machines
* remote488: added ieee-488 remotizer device
* remote488: added remotizer devices to ieee-488 buses of HP9845 & HP85
* remote488: added missing emu.h inclusion
* Revert "remote488: fixed a crash when using socketed bitbangers on Linux machines"
This reverts commit edfeb1768ec332ccdb77584e272d93b756819c41.
* remote488: nudge..
* remote488: no longer use locale-dependent functions, added commas and
semicolons as msg separators, improved use of util::string_format
* extracted decompressed data from Gunpey [Peter Wilhelmsen, Morten Shearman Kirkegaard]
- hooked these up for now while we study the compression scheme, fixing graphics [David Haywood]
machines promoted to WORKING
Gunpey (Japan) [Peter Wilhelmsen, Morten Shearman Kirkegaard, David Haywood]
some other gfx features (zooming for example) still need emulating.
* add sprite zooming
* drop flag (nw)
