Website updates, bugfixes, compatibility reports

Today I updated the CD-i Emulator website for the upcoming beta release and fixed some remaining bugs, mainly with input recording/playback.

I updated the Release Notes section, put up the hopefully final version of the Full Release Notes, added more screenshots and YouTube embeds and did some miscellaneous text edits. I also updated the CD-i Types section and added a download for it.

It was my intention to release tonight, but that didn't happen because the closed pre-beta testers aren't ready yet. I'll give it a few more days.

My next project will be updating the Title Support section of the website; I want to replace the static table with a much more dynamic one that can be expanded and sorted in various ways, based on a database of actual compatibility reports for specific CD-i player ROMs and CD-i titles that could be entered online.

I might even accept MESS CD-i compatibility reports to provide a basis for comparison. Users would also be able to "me too" on reports.

I would also like to add a "Report Compatibility" option to CD-i Emulator; that would allow automatic filling in of most of the report fields so that entering a compatibility report becomes pretty much a question of clicking only a "compatibility class" button and possibly entering some notes (fields like Reporter could be remembered on the reporter's PC using cookies). It should be easy to add the CD-i Emulator part of this; I might even do it for the current beta if the testers take long enough :-)

For crashes or decoding issues, it would also be useful to allow uploading of input recordings. Actually, uploading a "good recording" would be nice even for successful reports. I could even add an "autorecord" setting to CD-i Emulator to make recording easy; the performance hit should be minimal.

This would also allow "batch" uploading of compatibility reports at some later time; input recordings contain all of the necessary information except for the compatibility class and notes and these could easily be added with input annotations, which I was planning to add anyway.

Unfortunately, uploading a file cannot be automated easily from within CD-i Emulator: the user will have to manually browse for the file. Another way to handle this would be to automatically generate an e-mail compatibility report...