How does an emulator tell if a movie is or isn't a WIP?
On a related note, I like FCEU's Play Movie dialogue the best. It would be nice to have an identical one here as well.
I've just opened this emulator for the first time and have a lot to say on its usability:
1. There is no "Graphics" (or "Display", or at least something similar) menu. Settings that would go here: red/blue 3D toggle, maintain aspect ratio toggle, overlay switch, input display toggle, status bar toggle, frame counter toggle, fullscreen toggle, any filters or scalers added later. So far they just occupy other menus. It would be nice to be able to choose 1x, 2x, 3x and 4x resolution now, instead of starting with what looks like 4x by default.
2. More than a half of the "Video" menu items is superfluous and thus the menu is cluttered for no reason. For instance, you don't need to stop playback or recording if there is no movie loaded whatsoever — they should appear either in place of the respective items or be greyed out until then. "Reset and start recording" and setting the author's name should both go into the "Start recording" dialogue. There is no reason to have them separately. Also, the menu itself should rather be named "Movie".
3. Menus should be revamped and regrouped. "File" menu should contain a list of the recently used ROMs and "Properties" item to display ROM properties (and movie properties as well, if possible — would be a very useful function. The information to display in this case: movie author, amount of frames and realtime length, rerecords, recording start condition, stored ROM name and checksum). "Free Rom" should be "Close ROM". "State" and "Video"/"Movie" menus should be closer to "File" because their functions are more related to each other. "Pause" and "Screenshot" should go to "File" menu. "Input" should rather be renamed to "Config", and it should contain what it does now (except "Show button states") and have "Customize hotkeys" option in addition to that. The resulting root menu items are: File, State, Movie, Config, (Tools — added later as/if the development continues up to that point), Options, Graphics, Sound.
4. There is no need to have frame advance as a menu item — no-one will use it there, anyway. Speedup/slowdown should change the speed in fixed increments instead, be it percent scale (10%, 25%, 33%, 50%, 66%, 75%, 100%, 150%, 200%, 300%, 400%, etc.), or fps scale (5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240, etc.), or any other you can come up with. Fastforward button should default to something like 400% (ootherwise it should be customized).
Obviously, the emulator still needs other useful tools, such as RAM search/watch, rewind, basicbot, debugger/tracer, etc., but that is to be discussed later.
Otherwise, good job.
