Sharp MZ series setup issues

[darkfalzx]

Hey there!
Has anyone found a good way to import Sharp MZ family games into LB?
MAME appears to be the most workable option, but its cores for later systems in the series (mainly MZ-2500 and MZ-2520) are buggy as all hell. Cassette games don't load automatically, and each require a manual L, a "Play" from the cassette menu, and then a few minutes of listening to loading sounds.
EmuZ-XXXX emulators have great compatibility, and load cassettes at 10x speed, but don't seem to have a command line parser.
There is also an emulator called MZ-80B, but it's seemingly a bit of a mess (down to the way one must download it - the link is "broken", but you can still download the file if you fix the URL)

Another issue is with games that require a BASIC to be loaded. Under MAME it takes 2+ minutes to load just the basic itself, then another minute for the game, and I don't think there is any way to either script this or speed it up. This would've been  MZ-80B always boots in monitor mode, but can switch to basic instantly, but, seemingly, can only do it via a mouse-click, at which point it forgets what tape it was started with.

Anyone know a better way to do this?

EDIT: I think I might've found a way to get MAME working without the long load time and extra scripting! Well, at least for the MZ-700 games.

Though the MZ-700 core doesn't officially support save states, it DOES make them, and since I don't think MZ-700 has many multiload titles, one could simply dump a savestate right as the game loaded, then used that state file as the main ROM to boot from, except with a -state instead of a -cass. It's finicky though, since savestates don't save screen data, so best time to make them would be right as the game screen is about to fully refresh.

Edited May 31, 2024 by darkfalzx

[essjaygee]

Apologies for replying on this rather old thread, but I've had the same problem and decided to see if I could do something to make it easier for myself. 

Using AI tools extensively, I've come up with an Sharp MZ-700 emulator with a focus on quality-of-life features that make integrating into Launchbox fairly straghtforward. I know that AI isn't everyone's cup of tea, so I'm being very upfront about it. The code, docs and releases are at https://github.com/sgillon/Mz700Emul and there is a specific document showing the set up process in Launchbox, once you have the emulator running.

In a nutshell, the emulator is designed make any decisions about whether a given .mzf file is BASIC or machine code and run what it needs to automatically. You will need to supply the Sharp ROM, font and BASIC files yourself, but the repo has instructions on where to place and name them so that the emulator can detect them. It's not perfect emulation, but i was aiming for it to be good enough so I could play Nightmare Park easily....

Hopefully it will be useful to someone besides me. I hope to add some more features, and possibly extend to other MZ models too. Please let me know here if you have any thoughts, comments, issues etc.