Console Menu V1.7a Written By Andrew Bond (c)1996 Andrew Bond email : digidev@cix.compulink.co.uk 23 March 1996 New in 1.7a ----------- Stupid memory allocation bug fixed. New in 1.7 ---------- Vastly improved menu control, hit an a-z key and you will automatically be placed at the first entry starting with that letter, hit the same letter again and it will cycle though all entries starting with that letter. Description editor now built in, no more fighting with a text editor! (CRTL-D) Disabled text cursor when in menu. Support for 50 line mode. F1 now displays help screen. New in 1.6 ---------- Files can be deleted from within menu, 'delete' key. New command PAF, which places any parameters after the filename for use with vcs.exe What is it ? ------------ Console menu, formally known as Coleco menu. Lots of people seemed to be using the menu for other emulators, so I renamed it! Most of this documentation is still orientated for Colemdos, however it is relevant to most emulators. Console Menu is a front end for console emulators, primarily COLEM for DOS. It will display all game files in any specified directory or zip, then run your selection using a specified emulator, with any parameters you wish. Tried and tested emulators -------------------------- Menu works great with all the following emulators :- Colemdos - coleco vision Fmsxdos - msx vcs - atari 2600 vectrex - vectrex uae - amiga vgb-dos - gameboy Please mail me if you find any new DOS based emulators. Installation ------------ Copy menu.exe either into the same dir as your emulator, or anywhere described in your dos path. Copy example.cfg into the same dir as your emulator, then rename this to menu.cfg. This will give you a good starting file, you can then customise it yourself for your particular system. configuration file ------------------ Menu is very flexible, it uses a text based configuration file called menu.cfg. This file tells menu everything, from where the files are stored to which emulator you are using. You can edit this yourself with any text editor, the msdos editor 'edit' will do just fine. Try 'edit menu.cfg' at the dos prompt. If you have used the example.cfg file as a base, all possible commands will be described, just read the comment against each and decide what you require. Placing a # at the start of a line, comments that line out i.e. menu will ignor it. Firstly I know colemdos now supports independent rom cfg files, i.e. if you load a game dkong.rom it will look for a file dkong.cfg containing the parameters for that rom. However I don't like that method of configuration for one big reason, it requires lots of tiny files. Most modern PC's have a cluster size of 16 or 32k in size. Taking a 32k cluster size for example, a 1 byte file actually takes 32k of disk space, not 1 byte as reported by dir. If you have 100 .cfg files, each of say 20 bytes, they will occupy a whopping 3.2mb, yes mega byte of disk space! It is for this reason that I have extended the config file for menu, now every setting you desire for all your games can be stored in one file, occupying at most, 32k of you disk, instead of 3.2mb Commands :- Please see example menu.cfg for an example of all commands. ZIP Support ----------- You can now play games directly from a .zip file, greatly reducing required disk space and file count. To use this option you must specify a zip file, with the ZIP command, and a temporary directory with TMP. PKsoftware's PKUNZIP must also be accessible in you dos path. Make sure the zip file you use only contains MSDOS filenames, some ZIP files you find may contain long files from other OS's. To be sure, I would suggest creating any zip file yourself, with pkzip. BOY ROM names can't be read from ZIP files, as this would be just too slow. How much ? ---------- Its freeware, however if you like it please mail me a list of your game files! Seriously, please drop me an email so I can get some idea of how many people are using menu. Menu is NOT Public Domain, it is a copyrighted software product and may not be disassembled, reverse engineered or otherwise modified in any way. Thanks to Marcel de Kogel & Marat Fayzullin for a great emulator! Thanks to Dave W ( http://www.csun.edu/~hbbuse08 ) for a great Emulation Page! You will always find the latest version on Dave's page. Technical --------- There is no fixed limit on the number of games that menu can display. However as the number of games rises, so does the memory consumption. There will be a point where menu will be using so much memory that there is not enough left for the emulator to run. This may be resolved in a later release by paging out menu when invoking the emulator. Note : If and when you have enough roms for this to be a problem, you can now split them up into sub-directories which will overcome this. Menu has been deliberately written as a 16bit program, using only base memory, this means that its small, and should not upset COLEM's dpmi usage. Remember kids, what ever happens, its a feature not a bug! digidev@cix.compulink.co.uk