[Discussion] low cost launcher menus for Disk images

[jsmolina]

I was playing (these are POCs, that's why they are on Gists) last weekend with Total Dos Launcher. It's a very nice launcher, but the script forces you to zip the games. If you don't zip, it copies all the files from all the games in the same folder.

Decompressing a zip each time a game launches it's too much for the poor 8088. And it gives some CRC errors (yes, already).

Program launchers from the past are very tedious as they require lot of ours for something that can be easily automated just using modern scripting languages.

In the opposite approach, there are other ways to do it:

Menu.pl solution

• This POC generates a .yaml file and copies "Long Name" directories into "DOS Friendly Directories", this yaml is then input in menu.pl. This menu.pl is a code I found from ShadowM00n, that I would port also to python if you (all) like the idea. This one just generates a fancy .bat file with paging using the classic choice command. I don't know something more lightweight than that.

https://gist.github.com/jsmolina/d2d397d210e23dd4c4c76377a8b5b620

RLoader

This one does the same idea of copying the "Long name directories", but generates a LIST.txt expected in RLoader (https://github.com/marco-sacchi/RLoader ). https://gist.github.com/jsmolina/6d1c43341ad01571194a231629f1b70c

RLoader supports the text mode which will be nice for our poor 8088

[spark2k06]

Good idea. Personally I like RLoader, now what we also have to do is to prepare a good list of games compatible with the core, both Tandy 1000 and PCXT, and always launch a BAT using XTCTL to run each game in the best conditions.

[jsmolina]

Moving to the forum 😄 https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=5573