Date   : Fri, 01 Sep 2000 16:51:09 -0700 (PDT)
From   : Angus Duggan <angus@...>
Subject: Standard file format for BBC games?

Kris Adcock writes:
>Evening all!
>
>Would you mind if I used you all as a sounding board? :) I apologise in
>advance if this is one of those postings which comes up every six
>months, with a kind of "Why has no-one thought of this yet?" subject.
>
>Myself and a colleague at work are developing a Beeb emulator, mostly
>out of nostalgia. He (Paul Bates, the author of an ST emulator called

Why yet another BBC emulator? There are other emulators already, why not work
on one of the ones which has source available already? (BeebEm, xbeeb, etc.)

>Later on, we suddenly remember (memories begin flooding back - oh wasted
>childhood) that not all games boot in the same manner (not all
>SHIFT+BREAK). On some of them, you have to enter things like PAGE=&....,
>*EXEC, *RUN, CH."FLOAD", etc ... So this database could also do with
>supplying booting information, so that users could basically double-
>click a diskimage file, and have that game boot-up and setup joystick
>straight away. Hmmm.

The booting stuff can be taken care of with a BBC !BOOT file.

>But what if your favourite emulator (whichever that may be) had the
>ability to read the zip file directly, setup joystick remapping, boot
>the game, bring up a window of info telling you how to play the game,
>and bring up a webpage from the Internet giving you a scan of the
>original box art, an MP3 of the signature tune, and a hints guide?

>We've got lots of ideas regarding the actual format and implementation
>of all this, but we'll leave describing it all to another time (just
>want to see what people's initial reactions are first).

Sounds like a reasonable way of doing it.

a.