MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Odyssey 2 Voice emulation

> in reality you're going to have 'simple' cases and complex cases..
>
> in the end the long syntax will probably end up becoming
>
> mame64 megadriv -slot megadriv:cart,32x:edge -slot 32x:cart,tempo:edge
>
> of something like that

I have no real interest in what the syntax of the options are, and my gut feeling is that it's something that will likely have to evolve over time as different use cases for it are found. However, I would like to pose the following question:

Will this ultimately permit specifying an order for daisy-chained devices attached to any system port?

As an example, I'll take the Atari 800 since it's a machine I'm familiar with.

On-board, there are two cartridge slots and an Atari-standard SIO port for peripheral connection. Conceivably, there could be pass-through devices in both cartridge slots with cartridges attached to them, plus devices on the SIO bus that need to be chained in a specific order so that they can function properly (such as the 850 serial interface or SX212 modem). This could also apply to the joystick ports as well, since there were non-joystick peripherals (notably 80-column cards and speech synthesisers) that were controlled from them - and on the XL- and XE-series machines, the almost-totally-unused Parallel Bus Interface is also there.

Perhaps machine-specific syntax might be best, since the use cases are going to be dictated by the platform in use. Something like:

a800 cart1:passthroughdevice:frogger.bin cart2:passthroughdevice:pacman.bin sio:d1,dos25.atr:d2,blank.atr:cassette,draconus.cas:850;parallel0,printer;serial0,modem stick0:speechsynth

It looks ugly (and a system configured this way would never boot), but from reading it I can literally visualise exactly how all of these components would have been physically-attached to a system. Colons separate each individual device; semicolons indicate a port or other point of connection on a specific device; commas denote what is attached to that point of connection.