- Reduce the Pictures application ROM footprint. I believe that we should simply drop the Pictures application and use the space for Invaders.gt1 and the Pluggy SD Card browser. Compressing such low resolution pictures will not work great anyway.
- Main: Some startup logo as intro, eg. gigatron letters from the box. Any takers?
- Loader: make noise while loading (only channel 1 is safe to use). This would increase the RAM footprint of the loader and increase the potential for conflicting gt1 files. What is needed is a loader that is entirely native and does not use RAM space. AT67 has such a loader in his ROMvX0. Therefore this is best left for the future.
- Faster SYS_Exec_88, with start address (GT1)?. Same problem as the loader. I have a working one, to be described in a future post. But including such a big change means taking a risk. My preference would be to add this into the new dev rom.
- Let SYS_Exec_88 clear channelMask when loading into live channels. This is incorrectly marked as done. It works in the Loader only. Therefore we might need the new sys_Exec after all.
But before doing this, there are a number of questions that are best answered by the community.
- Is there agreement on the idea of releasing a ROMv5 at this point?
- How should it be called: ROMv5? ROMv5b?
- If called ROMv5, how to make sure that people understand that 5 > 5a? Should we remove the binaries for ROMv5a (but leave the possibility to rebuild them in the Makefile)?
- Should we allocate a new romTypeValue (0x40 for ROMv5a, 0x48 for ROMv5?). This is probably related to the previous answer because, if we keep ROMv5a as a full fledged past rom, we need to be able to differentiate them in code. If we don't, then we might still like to be able to differentiate them in code. And all this has to go into the interface.json file.
- And the big question: Which selection of applications should we include? My preference would be to remove "Pictures" and add AT67's excellent "Invaders" as well as a user-friendly version of the pluggy reloaded browser. This requires adding a new line in the Main Menu. Any other ideas?