The free-for-all on labels in software lists is not working. There's no
consistency, labels are getting excessively long, people are starting to
use non-ASCII characters in labels making it harder for others to type
them when manipulating files on the command line, and there's too much
markup being put in labels.
The length limit is 127 characters, same as for labels in MAME itself.
This should be long enough to be descriptive. Remember that the Win32
path limit is 260 characters, and many applications and frameworks have
issues with longer paths, including Windows Explorer and the .NET
framework. Labels are used as filenames, so concessions need to be
made for this.
I have not abbreviated excessively long labels myself - they're
currently causing 135 validity errors. Someone else can fix them.
Printable ASCII characters are allowed, with a few exceptions. The
exceptions are limited to characters most likely to cause issues for
interactive shells and scripts:
* ! - csh event substitution (very difficult to escape properly)
* $ - sh varibale expansion
* % - csh job control, cmd variable expansion
* / - UNIX directory separator
* : - sh path separator, Windows drive qualifier
* \ - sh escape, Windows directory separator
Most of the labels that had to be edited were using ! for markup, or
using ! and % for titles in labels. Strangely, titles in labels are
often forced to lower case, despite this never being enforced for
software lists. There are also various other edits to titles used for
labels, such as moving articles to the end (with or without a comma),
or replacing spaces with underscores. As I already said, there's no
consistency at all.
There is far too much markup in labels. They're even being used for
notes in some cases (e.g. at least one case where a dumper's name is in
the label). The XML schema supports metadata - use it. For example,
you can use part_id for an unrestricted display name for a software
part. You can also use XML comments for notes.
And while on the topic of metadata, vgmplay.xml is putting the same
thing in the part_id as well as the label. The part_id should have
the actual title, not the title mangled to make it more suitable for
use as a filename. Addressing this would be a lot of work, given how
large the file is.
For now, empty data areas in software lists cause a verbose message
rather than a validation warning. There are thousands of software
lists using empty data areas to indicate the size/width of cartridge
RAM/EEPROM/etc.
Get rid of a couple of copies of the CC0 text. Add header comment to
CC0 files to remind people editing them what the terms are. Also add
some missing XML headers. The header comments in layouts won't bloat
the binary - they get stripped out before compressing, same as any other
comments.
* megadriv.xml - mark sonic protos as comming from loose eproms
* megadriv.xml - Add another Sonic 2 prototype dump
* gamegear.xml - Add Sonic 2 proto
* megadriv.xml - Add Sonic 3 prototype
* load16_word_swap
* Missed one
* New prototypes:
gamegear:
Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos (Euro, Prototype 19930517) [Hidden Palace]
sms:
Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos (Euro, "Ver 0.20", Prototype 19930630) [Hidden Palace]
Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos (Euro, Prototype 19930713) [Hidden Palace]
These prototypes are believed to have been solely burned for Sega Europe/UK, and thus are all labeled "Euro".
* Mark sms/sonicc630 as not working, as it somehow crashes after the title screen.
renamed sonicc in gamegear.xml from "Sonic Chaos" to "Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos" to maintain consistency (box art for Game Gear release packaging says "Sonic the Hedgehog Chaos" too) as well, while correcting a capitalization error for actionfg0.
which allows to launch SMS games in the gamegear driver, with video chip
in SMS mode. You can try this by launching
mess.exe gamegear -cart mgear -cart2 your_sms_game
(the -cart2 switch becomes available when you mount "mgear" in the main
gamegear cart slot) [Fabio Priuli]
out of the whatsnew: for the moment only fullpath loading is supported, and it is not
ensured to work 100%. thanks to Enik Land for pointing me to the necessary info.
when loading from softlist. [Fabio Priuli]
from fullpath it still allocates 32k for every game, and if the game enables RAM the content is saved at exit.
- Converted cart handling and mappers to use slot devices
- Simplified bios and cart bankswitch mechanism
- Added save state support to both systems
- Removed on-cart EEPROM from main gamegear now that
it can be properly implemented on carts which have it
- Made LCD persistence hack optional (ON by default, it can
be turned OFF from Driver Configuration submenu)
- Reduced tagmap lookups all across the driver
