Quietust wrote:
1. Switching disks in normal games becomes much more complicated - rather than simply pressing a key to "select next disk side", you now have to browse to the location of the disk file and manually select it.
Then perhaps allow switching only among side files in a particular folder. If you want to play with a disk editor, drop shortcuts[1] to the sides that you want to edit into the folder.
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2. Savestates now have to keep track of the disk filename they currently have loaded
The state of a machine includes which medium is inserted into its storage device. This was true when only a side number was saved, and it remains true when an entire filename must be saved.
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3. Playing back movies (i.e. input recordings) also becomes problematic, because you would either have to store the full path to the disk file (and make it difficult to play the movie on any system other than the one used to record it)
Does a cartridge-based movie file have to store the entire absolute path to the ROM image that was used?
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It's one thing to run a graphics/disk editor on a real Famicom for managing physical disks, but why bother running those programs in an emulator when you can run a native Windows/Linux/etc. application
Produce one editor for FDS, and have it run on Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and any other operating system to which a Famicom emulator supporting FDS has been ported. You don't have to go out and license a separate operating system to run Windows-only apps that don't work in Wine, and you don't have to go out and buy a separate computer to run Mac OS X-only apps whose author is unwilling to port them to GNUstep. That's one part of why I made a
background graphics editor that runs on an NES: it was easier at the time than learning native application development for another platform.
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and benefit from the additional processing power, input methods (e.g. a mouse)
Infiniteneslives built me an adapter to connect the Super NES mouse to an NES, and I remember you added support for it to Nintendulator. The mouse driver already in
Thwaite would work on an AV Famicom, and with some software changes (D1 instead of D0), the mouse through a similar adapter would work on the original Famicom as well. Or an editor could support the protocol used by Famiclone mice.
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display resolution
Double-edged sword. Run it on the authentic console and you get authentic NTSC filtering for free. That's the other reason I made my graphics editor: I was tired of having to edit tiles and the palette, copy to CF, insert into PowerPak, test, eject CF, and repeat, just to make sure they still look legible on a TV.
[1] Or aliases or symlinks or whatever your preferred OS calls them.