thrust26
commented
10 months ago This has been discussed multiple times. While the idea is good, there are multiple steps which have to be done:
- Stella could easily define and support such a format, but that's not the right way to do it. There are other emulators (gopher2600, z26., Javatari, Mame, Libretro, Android, iOS...) and we should align with them. This had been started in the past (on a lower level), but never lead to results.
- What should be the feature set of this software? All you listed above? Less, more? Which features are mandatory? Only the ROM? Who is the authority to define that?
- Next are multi carts. These should be able to handle the new format too. This affects Harmony/Encore, Plus/UnoCart, Krokodile Cart, Starpath multicharger... Most likely this will require a transfer program (Windows, Linux, MacOS...), which extracts the ROM from the container.
- A major problem is, who will convert and distribute the thousands of ROMs out there? There has to be software which does this as a batch. And volunteers, who will add the missing information. We need a easy to use software for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS...) which also allows converting individual files.
- Since this will never be completely done, emulators will still have to support raw ROMs.
- ... most likely more which I forgot now.
IMO it is not on the Stella team to orchestrate the efforts (and we do not have enough time anyway). So who will organize this? You? Without anyone driving the project, I cannot see all of this happening anytime soon. Or only with major, continuous effort from multiple, interested sides.
Anyway, I can assure you that, when the final format is defined, Stella will support it.
GorillaSapiens
it's almost 2024, and we're still passing around rom binaries like a bunch of savages. at least we're naming them .a26 these days and not just .bin. but we can do better.
there needs to be a container format. something along the lines of Java Jar files, a glorified *.zip, but with a different extension, with a predefined set of files inside.
files inside would be the rom file, a config file with the system type, bankswitching scheme, controllers used, number of players, etc... optional parts could be the user manual (scanned AND text version), scans of the box cover art, scans of cartridge labels, notes, trivia, whatever...