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As for "your favourite (old) emulator not being compatible", tough! Why are you using such an old emulator?
People won't see it that way. They'll see it just the opposite.
"This format doesn't work in my emulator? Tough! Why should I use such a silly format!"
If you want this format to gain ANY ground, you have to make it as friendly for the
user as possible... as they're ultimately going to be the ones that determine how much ground it gets.
Besides... from the get go you're pretty much declaring that this format is to have zero backwards compatibility. Which not only means it won't work in old emulators... but it won't work in ANY emulators for a good while. NEStopia is possibly the only "mainstream" emu still in very active and steady development... which means
if Marty decides to impliment support for it, it'll pretty much be Joe Gamer's only option. People that use different emus (not necessarily out of date) will be SOL.
EDIT -- maybe Mednafen too? Though I don't know if the NES area is still being worked on?
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In the end, there just needs to be some collaboration in coming up with the names and they need to be defined somewhere like on the wiki.
I guess I don't see a distinction between unanimously coming up with a common board name and coming up with a designated mapper number. The only real difference is a string vs. integer.
*shrug*
Either way though. Updating UNIF would work -- but that would require the same emu update demand. Unrecognized board names won't load in popular emulators -- but most iNES mapper numbers are already covered.
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As for having the SRAM in the ROM. I stand by it. If you want to copy it out, then just use a hex editor.
But
why? I mean really... give me one single advantage to putting SRAM in the ROM image? It doesn't make any sense, doesn't offer any benefits, and adds a handful of complications for both emu developer AND emu user.
People that keep their ROMs on read-only media (a la CDs) won't be able to have saved games. Emus with .zip or other compressed file format support will have to recompress the ROM every unload. People wanting to retain their old save games won't be able to without having to do manual editing (which may seem easy for you, but Joe Gamer is generally clueless about such activities).
So those are some downsides -- what upsides do you have in mind for wanting to include SRAM? And do they outweigh the problems?