> > skipping that could lead to misbehaves of the emulator in some corner case, and it > is > > not ensured to work properly as soon as you leave the happy realm of consoles to > > enter the more complex world of home computers > > I have never had MESS misbehave when not explicitly specifying the device, and if any > corner cases arise they should be fixed.
multiple softlists attached to the console with a common shortname could trigger the wrong game being loaded (the first softlist added is being used)
for home computer it is even trickier: some multidisk games require all drives to be filled to work, some other games require only a specific disk to be loaded at boot and others to be loaded later when prompted. currently, if you skip the media switch, MESS tries to fill every drive with a disk image and this has been chosen because it seems (from tests on current softlist) the solution which gives a better % of loading screen / error messages instead of blank screens with no clue about what is wrong... but of course there are always cases where only loading disk 1 would give a better result