MESS wish list

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General

Cleanup

Clean up the drivers (ti99_4x and geneve and all related). A checklist is provided on the MAME developer wiki.

Documentation

We should have some documentation of the drivers. This will allow people to quickly understand the internals and to extend them.

Keyboard issues

Using the PC keyboard in the emulation

Currently, the TI emulation uses an emulated keyboard layout. While this layout correctly emulates the original keyboard, it is very difficult to work with such a layout when the keys are labeled differently.

This should be solvable using keymaps. However, I have not yet checked this.

Update: This is available as the natural keyboard. Note the following mapping:

• F2 ... F10 are mapped to FCTN-2 ... FCTN-0
• F12 is FCTN-= (QUIT)
• Del is FCTN-1
• Arrow keys are mapped to FCTN-ESDX

The mapping should be reconsidered, because the Del/Ins handling is confusing.

Cut/Paste facility

Classic99 obviously allows that, but currently there is no way to interface between MESS emulations and the system clipboard. Mind that MESS emulates more than 200 different systems. Could be some special function, though.

In that case, it would be interesting to copy the screen image table to the clipboard. Pasting could be translated to a key press sequence.

Miscellaneous

• Better and/or individual configuration of keyboard
• Shortcut and/or function key to toggle Throttle

Emulation

Visible/audible feedback

The LEDs which indicate peripheral access should be emulated as well. It would also be nice to hear floppy activity to give a "real feeling".

MESS maintainers believe this should be possible with the artwork subsystem.

User interface

Replace the close-to-unusable OSD in SDLMESS by a GTK+-based interface.

Devices

Compact Flash Device

Emulate the CF7 device.

SCSI subsystem

Emulate the ASCSI / Whtech SCSI controller.

Tool to sync harddrive and image

A tool would be nice which syncs the changes on the emulated hard drive with those on the real drive. This would greatly help to keep consistency between the emulated and the real system.

TI-99/2 emulation

Complete 99/2 emulation

More expansion cards

• 128K GRAM
• The CorComp controller should be re-animated. Moreover, the Myarc FDC could be emulated.
• Emulate the CP/M card. However, I don't have any specs.

Check IDE emulation

IDE is not verified to work. The problem is that there is no working IDE HD image currently. We need to produce a good image first.

True serial interface

The RS232 emulation should be connected to the real serial interface in both directions to allow for external communication. Also the parallel port could be hooked up.

Tools

Create disk image from file

Input: some TI files; output: a disk image to be mounted in MESS.