A homebrew proposal

[DasFool]

So I've had a quick glance at how the prs-505 runs user code. Basically it'll run any app that is created as an autorun file. This is all well and good, but what if you have multiple useful apps that you want to run, this means you will need a memory card/stick for each application. The situation seems less than optimal.

What I propose is creating a simple loader application. This would be launched with autorun and then it would be able to launch other programs through a simple menu. To add other apps to it, the user would either enter the info into a text file or possibly use a small app to create the TOC for all apps on the memory card/stick. Eventually, if this gets working well enough someone could create a new sony image with a menu entry to launch the app loader from inside the sony menu. That way the user wouldn't have to continually remove and insert cards to get things to work. This would create a way to run multiple programs from one card and open the door to other things, possibly a replacement for the current prs-505 library?

I'm an inexperienced coder myself, and I'm not confident of my ability to create something like this, but I thought I'd get the idea out there and see what others think.

[NatCh]

Sounds like a good idea, DasFool. I think it's got some merit to it.

[lionfish]

Originally Posted by DasFool

So I've had a quick glance at how the prs-505 runs user code. Basically it'll run any app that is created as an autorun file. This is all well and good, but what if you have multiple useful apps that you want to run, this means you will need a memory card/stick for each application. The situation seems less than optimal.

What I propose is creating a simple loader application. This would be launched with autorun and then it would be able to launch other programs through a simple menu. To add other apps to it, the user would either enter the info into a text file or possibly use a small app to create the TOC for all apps on the memory card/stick. Eventually, if this gets working well enough someone could create a new sony image with a menu entry to launch the app loader from inside the sony menu. That way the user wouldn't have to continually remove and insert cards to get things to work. This would create a way to run multiple programs from one card and open the door to other things, possibly a replacement for the current prs-505 library?

I'm an inexperienced coder myself, and I'm not confident of my ability to create something like this, but I thought I'd get the idea out there and see what others think.

That's exactly what I think. If we can insert a single card and have all the books and programs in it, then press a key on the reader to invoke this loader and then run the program we want such as dictionary or the swap book program. That would be perfect.

[cybat]

There is actually something like this on the Nintendo Wii console.

[mkaluza]

I thought about it too - the "apps" would be modules in a standard format, and for example calibre could have an option of (un)installing given modules(which would mean rebuildng autorun.xml and adding/removing support files). It's actually fairly easy since it's xml and we could use standard libraries - the only thing to care about are overlapping names. I'm working on it - as soon as I figure out, how to put multiple "windows" into autorun.xml and switch between them, I'll post it here.

greetz
Martin