the readme you provided didn't help me, but it was nice to know you consider me to be the target audience
Heh, indeed. Well, I guess I'll bite the bullet and write out steps here for your Hatari example. I'll assume you have the Hatari from
here.
I don't have any Atari ST games, nor have I ever used one, so you may have to change some aspects to suit your needs. For my testing I used some random
demo.
Before starting, make sure you rescan your pnds, to make sure Hatari is available in the Pandafe pnd cache (press select to open the main menu and choose Scan PNDs).
Add Atari ST Platform Definition
* switch to Platform Folders view
* select the platform folder you'd like to add it to, press space to bring up the context menu and choose edit
* choose Platforms, select a location to insert the new platform, press B or enter, choose Insert Above/Below, choose New, choose Rom Based
* specify platform name, rom folder, and file extension(s). I used "msa" for the rom extension as that was what the demo used.
* choose Programs, then Insert Item, and we're on to adding program definition(s)
Add Hatari Program Definitions
* select Game/Emulator/Hatari 1.4.0 (Atari ST emu)
* change the name (if you like). I removed the "(Atari ST emu)" part.
* choose Command to bring up a GtkSourceView window to edit a custom command
Specify a Custom Command for Hatari 1.4.0
Now we've presumably come to the meat of your question. Before selecting Command in the previous step, that item listed "./run140.sh" as the current command. This is the script that is launched when you start that app directly. Our goal here is to modify that command so that it passes command line arguments from Pandafe through to the actually invocation of Hatari. Some apps already support this, but most don't.
At this stage its usually necessary to do some research on the emu in question, to understand which command line arguments they support and which need to be specified in order to launch a game directly. This is not always possible -- the emulator binary obviously needs to support this direct launching. For Hatari, I found the necessary documentation
here. This was so much Greek to me, not understanding the Platform, but I found the requisite option under "Disk Options":
−−disk-a <file> Set disk image for floppy drive A
Now then, the GtkSourceView window should currently show us the contents of the "./run140.sh" (as indicated by the frame label on top). We can edit this buffer to create our custom command. Once you start making changes, the frame label will change to "Custom" to reflect this. You can press Revert to undo you changes and return to whatever you started with when you chose "Command" back in the menu. If you already had a custom command, pressing Stock will put the app's stock script in the buffer. The Open button will let you load other scripts from the mounted app, in case you want to investigate things that way. And if you need to really dig into things deeper, the Terminal tab at the top will give you a shell in the mounted app folder (/mnt/utmp/hatari.skeezix here). This allows you to, for example, run the emulator binary directly to experiment, or to run your (previously saved) custom command for testing.
OK, so getting back to it. The very bottom of the ./run140.sh script contains the invocation of the emulator (and the options used are nicely commented above it).
./hatari-1.4.0 -z 2 --tos ./tos.img --borders 0 -s 1 -d ./hdd_drive_c
We will need to edit this line to pass command line arguments received by the script to the invocation of hatari-1.4.0. This step benefits from a working knowledge of shell scripting. The short short version is that $1 represents the first argument passed, and $@ represents all arguments passed. I'll use $@, from force of habit. Its worth noting here also that Pandafe supports specifying command line options as part of a Program definition, allowing those options to be specified and stored per game. That's a rather longer topic, but in that case we'd use $@ to pass whatever all those options are. Moving on...
So we need to add something like "--disk-a /path/to/our/demo.msa" to that invocation. Using "--disk-a $@" will accomplish that. I also noticed when reading the manual that we can get fullscreen by adding "-f". Why not? Our final result then is:
./hatari-1.4.0 -z 2 --tos ./tos.img --borders 0 -s 1 -d ./hdd_drive_c -f --disk-a $@
After all that ramble, the actual actionable steps collapse to:
* add "-f --disk-a $@" to the end of the last line
* press OK (now we're back to the menu, and the Command is "(custom)"
* choose Save
Add Program Definition for Hatari 1.6.1
Might as well add another one..
* press B/Enter on Hatari 1.4.0 in the Programs list
* choose Insert Below
* repeat the above for Hatari 1.6.1 (Atari ST Emu)
* (make sure to add "-f --disk-a $@" before the "# -d ./hdd_drive_c" bit at the end of the last line (which is a comment)
Finish Up
We should now be back at the Programs list
* press space or X to move down from the list to the Cancel/Save actions for the list
* choose Save (...and not Cancel! If you happen to Cancel accidentally, you'll have to repeat the platform creation steps, but the program definitions you created will still be there and you can just add them to the platform)
* select Default Program and choose one of the new programs as the default (using right/left or B/Enter)
* choose Save
Now we're back at the list of Platforms for the Platform Folder we started out with at the beginning.
* press space or X to move down from the list to the Cancel/Save actions for the list
* choose Save (same note applies about Cancel -- the new Platform is already saved at this point, so it could still be added to the Platform Folder if you make a mistake)
* choose Save on the Edit Platform Folder screen
All done!
* close the context menu by pressing space or A or escape
At this point I was able to open the Atari ST platform and run the demo I downloaded.
Whew! Hopefully that crash course helps illustrate enough of functionality that you can get working any other platform and/or program that you set your mind to. Hmm, perhaps I should add all that to the README...
In case you ran into problems with any of this, here's a tarball with the working definitions I created. Extract it to appdata/pandafe.
Platform_AtariST__Program_Hatari.tar.gz
If you take a look at the definitions, you'll notice they're YAML, which in theory makes it possible to do all the above in a text editor. That's probably crazy talk, but hopefully it does make sharing definitions easy enough to encourage it. If you do start knocking those out, it might be nice to include them in a future Pandafe updates for others to enjoy.
Have fun!
