#397 Replace autoload snapshots with "phantom typist"

[Philip Kendall]

Rather than having an autoload snapshot for every machine, it would be possible to have a "phantom typist" which typed LOAD "" or similar.

[Philip Kendall]

I've pushed a first attempt at this to the patches-397-phantom-typist branch. Relative to our existing implementation using autoload snaps:

Pros

• Will work with any enabled hardware / firmware (ESXDOS, Spectranet etc)
• Would be very easy to extend to support things like Pheenix which need LOAD ""CODE rather than just LOAD ""
  • I think would be easy to extend to support loading from all other media (+D disks etc)
• Will work with any non-default ROMs which have moved the tape routines around
• Doesn't need all those ugly autoload snaps
• Looks cool :-)

Cons

• A bit slower as we have to wait for the reset sequence to complete
  • Much slower on the +3 as we need to wait for the disk access to time out before loading from tape
• Won't work with non-default ROMs which (e.g) change to single character entry
  • But I think we could add a --phantom-typist-mode option to allow people to override the default selection

I'm honestly undecided at the moment whether this is better - any thoughts?

[Philip Kendall]

Support for LOAD ""CODE games like Pheenix now added (note [bugs:#333]).

One additional pro of the phantom typist: by adding a small random delay to the typing, we could fix the issue of games which seed their RNG from the FRAMES system variable meaning we wouldn't have deterministic behaviour.

[Fredrick Meunier]

This looks really good to me. I think the speed part could be addressed by running the emulator at a higher speed until the typist is done?

I'd be tempted to allow an override to the phantom typist mode to be part of the machine status as you suggest.

[Fredrick Meunier]

Trying a few tapes and disks, I don't even think that the +3 disk timeout for tape is very annoying (and loading +3 software from tape is presumaby uncommmon vs loading it into other models)

[Philip Kendall]

Fastloading now applies while the phantom typist is active - and yes, it makes things much nicer.

I've also fixed an issue with LOAD ""CODE games not working on the +2A - they still don't work on the +3 though. I think we need to do LOAD "t:" followed by LOAD ""CODE, but if anybody knows a better way, let me know.

[Philip Kendall]

LOAD ""CODE games fixed on the +3 as well.

I've just tested this patch against the check_loaders data set and there are no regressions :-)

[Fredrick Meunier]

Looking very good to me!

[Philip Kendall]

Two more changes on this branch:

• Replacing the +3 autoload snapshot with the phantom typist - this gives us feature parity with the autoload snapshots.
• Actually deleting out all the autoload snapshots from source control.

I think the only thing this leaves to be implement is the "override phantom typist mode" option - although I'll add Pheenix to the check_loaders regression tests as well.

[Sergio Baldoví]

Looks good to me

[Philip Kendall]

And I've now done the --phantom-typist-mode option. As far as I'm concerned, this one is now ready to merge.

[Philip Kendall]

And merged.