The setup program is needed eventually and should be pretty easy to work on different sections in parallel and glue the pieces together for the 80 columns mode. Now it would be cool to have user pictures and game icons which we could do with mode 3, but it's hard to justify the low resolution for this one unless someday we can mix video modes..I digress. The setup program should easily be able to handle the full FatFS, and I think it would be very nice if the setup program can just download an official SD image so everyone is working with the exact same thing. When you are done developing a game the .uze and resource files get added to the official image. Everyone can keep their image current with no searching and only a couple pushes of a button. As far as I know we wouldn't even need FatFS for that, could we just download a 512 byte block at a time and dump it to the SD card to clone it?
What does this setup program need? I think these are mostly accepted ideas:
- 1. 8266<->router setup
2. chat room
3. game browser+however you setup a join then launch a rom?
4. sd update to official version
5. setup player nickname, bio, etc.
6. 8266 firmware update(would require the user to manually update to a version that can do web updates if not already, or implement more complicated UART upgrade)
7. maybe built in Telnet
I didn't bookmark the site so I have to find it again. With difficulty I tracked down a very cool minimal webpage that you can send a URL to and it spits back at you a well formatted text only version of any webpage, and a list of links at the bottom(which could simply not be drawn, and be stored in SPI ram if the user wants to follow a link). The format was usable for the sites I tried, and the forums worked pretty well. It was like the Lynx browser, but not. A later bell and/or whistle that is possible. Obviously no images, java, client code, etc...I don't know, because we have ram and we can?
We should have tons of flash to spend. What graphic resources does this beast need? Upper and lower case font, a cursor, and a simple menu frame ought to be the minimum.
I envision this thing cursor based and supporting both the SNES mouse and keyboard interface or falling back to a joypad when not available. Using the joypad to move a cursor works well when a mouse isn't available as in Uzesweeper and *secret game related to Uzesweeper*. It has the advantage that you can more easily deal with multiple interactive elements on the screen. If you are in the chat room it would be nice to secondary click on some ones name and then click "request game" or something.
How can we make it easy for people to find each other? I thought we could go the standard route, if you wanted to play a game you create a lobby and people join it. You trash talk before the game, then click play. I'm not naive enough to think there is ever going to be 100's of people on this service, and because of that, I bet people are pretty flexible on what game they will play when they actually find someone else available. Maybe a lobby isn't really needed. It could be part of the chatroom, and you could simply set your status to "looking for game", you talk to someone ask what game they want to play, the setup program tells uzebox.net you guys are joining a game. Reset your console, load up the game you agreed on, click "Play on Uzenet" and the game asks uzebox.net "what game did I agree to play?"(since the ESP8266 has forgotten after the reset), then play. The advantage is games do not need lobby code, simple a standard API that asks where to connect and proceeds from there. Your odds of sitting in any 1 particular game waiting for someone else to also be waiting in that particular game as well are pretty poor I would say.
I am starting to work on the emulation again starting tomorrow afternoon, it isn't far from done.
