Wouldn't a (much) larger font solve the problem? Plus navigation with controllers just like Harmony does it?

Still wouldn't solve the problem of the UI essentially still being text-based. And the buttons being there essentially implying to use a keyboard and mouse.

What the new UI would look like is still up for debate. But I guess the main difference is one is a keyboard/mouse (aka, WIMP) interface, and the other will be more graphical (skins, etc) and icons only (think Windows Metro or Apple iOS).

IMO a joystick controlled UI has to be much closer to a keyboard controlled UI than a touch controlled UI.

Well, yes, behind the scenes the code will mostly be the same, and could be controlled from either a joystick or a keyboard. What I want to remove is the requirement of a mouse (but I suppose it could still work with one). And not having buttons, scrollbars, etc.

Basically make it look very similar to the R77 UI, but have all the features of Stella file/directory handling behind the scenes. And be skin-able; this is very important to many people.

Agreed, the 4 launcher buttons make not much sense in such an UI. Also searching for files by name without a keyboard is pretty tedious and useless.

And instead of scrolling you will have paging.

A 2D file list allows faster navigation with a joystick, but then we probably need multi-line ROM names.

Yes, it's all relatively easy to do. Removing stuff is of course very easy. And what you call 'paging' is simply scrolling (so still using the current code) a page at a time :) It's mostly a re-arrangement of the current UI elements, and changing what's drawn in the background (solid colours vs. PNG). Nothing insurmountable. Of course even if I get to this, it will only be for Stella 5; I'm not backporting anything else to Stella 3.

Logging off for the evening ...

I wonder what the icons should display, as generic icons make little sense and are just a waste of space.

• ROM size
• Controller type
• Company logo
• screenshot thumbnail, maybe even animated
• what else?

We could make this configurable by the user. And also if the want large icons or small ones. In the end it might look like that Windows Explorer which I am never using. 😄

Instead of icons, we could also display the (scaled) images from the ROM Info viewer.

BTW: A fullscreen mode for the launcher seems like a good idea too.

I think everything we need is in the current version of Stella: large fonts, resizeable snapshot area, text that 'flows' on linebreaks, etc. So I consider this done.