Joe

Currently Spec128 only seems to support SNA and Z80 file formats.
Most files on WOS are now in TAP or TZX (TZX being the preferred format). It would be nice to be able to use these. (unless it can already in which case, How?)
Some people might like to load these files at real time speed (complete with loading stripes etc, just for the real nostalgia) though personally I'm not bothered by that.

48k Sound is a tad rough sounding but this is not /that/ important.

Out of interest, do you regret leaving RISC OS? Are you tempted back by the Iyonix?
Go on, say you are ;-)

Many thanks

[Edited by MAD NURSE at 17:14, 9/7/2003]

Spec128 does indeed only support SNA and Z80 files at the moment. TAP and TZX support have been mentioned to me before, so that'll probably be next on the list. I was thinking of implementing TZX first, since that's becoming more common, but part of the spec for TZX files includes TAP-like data, so I'll probably do TAP first.

Yep, 48k sound is rough. I know why, but I couldn't think of a better way to implement it whilst keeping the simplicity (and hence speed, hopefully) of the current design. That's not to say it can't be improved, I may reexamine this. In theory the 48k sound should be best when running with hi-res colour with the speed at 100%.

I'm guessing from a few comments I've heard that some people who use Spec128 also use Z80Em. Thus, I'd be interested in adding features that Z80Em lacks, so that the two emulators cover the features people want between them, if not individually. Are there any games that don't work with Z80Em?

As far as using RISC OS goes, I've still got my RPC but I use Windows for day to day stuff. There are some things I miss, the obvious one being the user interface. Of the x86 operating systems, I like the BeOS interface the most, but that's becoming obsolete in terms of hardware support. I use Linux occasionally and I hate it. The designers appear to see no merit whatsoever in making a computer easy to use, sort of like the opposite of RISC OS. Recent attempts at adding GUIs to Linux look like they just want to copy Windows, and fail to address the obvious limitations of Windows. So in the absence of any real advantages of using Linux, I use XP. It's as stable as Linux desktops are, it's a rare exception to come across a piece of software I can't run, I can get dirt cheap hardware from computer fairs (safe in the knowledge there'll be a driver), I can view any web page and run any media file. The GUI is bad, but still better than many. I confess to liking Excel, not least because of VBA. On balance, I think Windows suits my needs best at the moment. I'm the first to admit it's taken much of the fun out of day-to-day computing though.

The Iyonix is tempting, but sadly the price isn't. RISC OS hardware has always seemed to represent poor value for money to me (I never bought a StrongARM, for example). The Iyonix's PCI bus could change that - it'll be interesting to see if people take up the challenge of getting stuff working under RISC OS.

Anyway enough complaining from me, by all accounts the RISC OS crowd have got plenty to look forward to.

Spec128 is pretty fast as it stands and my current thinking (IMHO) is that if it works full speed on 7500FE machines and up then it's doing fine.
Currently it runs on an A5000 with a small frameskip so no worries there.
Ultimately if it ends up requiring a StrongArm CPU then so be it. It won't be the only emulator that does.

On the subject of new features to be added, you may be sorry you asked ;-)

In addition to loading TAP and TZX files, the ability to load WAV files would be useful (probably need to be done in real time but only really needs to be loaded once).

The ability to output sound to a WAV file would be nice too (for sad people who like that sort of thing)

And as a real challenge ability to output to an AVI movie!

Things like loading from +D or Disciple discs or images don't interest me personally but other people might like it.

It might be an idea to ask for feature requests on comp.sys.acorn.games / misc
to see what other people want (I suspect more people read the newsgroups than these boards)

Cheers!