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joncampbell123 / dosbox-x

DOSBox-X fork of the DOSBox project
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Activity indicators #1427

Open rderooy opened 4 years ago

rderooy commented 4 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. A way to see the activity of attached devices would be helpful to see that something is going on. At a minimum some drive indicator LEDs

Describe the solution you'd like I'm thinking about an (optional) status bar at the bottom with activity LEDs for the attached drives. Perhaps if you hover over a LED it could show the attached disk image name or something. Clicking on it would perhaps give you the ability to swap to another disk.

In addition to these LED's, perhaps some others that would be useful would be to indicate activity on a sound device, so you know it's talking to the MT32 for instance, or your soundblaster perhaps to check what is outputting sound.

Regarding the MT32, it would be very cool if you could see the SysEx messages like on the original MT32 LCD screen. Some games actually use that like Space Quest III or Lucasfilm games.

Additional context Other LEDs that might be useful:

joncampbell123 commented 4 years ago

Perhaps before this feature is added, DOSBox-X should first add an optional status bar at the bottom of the window so the LEDs have a place to go. Just like VirtualBox.

arromdee commented 4 years ago

Given that old monitors were normally aspect 4:3 screens and modern ones are normally 16:9, it may make more sense to put the status on the side, not the bottom.

rderooy commented 4 years ago

While I agree with the general idea, how many programs do you know with vertical status bars? And especially once that work. I cannot think of any. It could work for just a few status LED's but anything more complex like a MT-32 display would not work.