Game Roulette

[DCEnygma]

I had an idea for something I'd like to do with an NES emulator (such as NEStopia) but I was hoping someone on these forums might have an idea of how to best go about it.

I wanted to create a NES Game Roulette of sorts. You can have a handful of ROMs set up (or just pull from the recently opened file) and when you start the Roulette, it sets a random timer between 1 and 5 minutes that runs hidden. When the timer resolves, it save states and opens a different random ROM from the list and auto-loads the save state if one exists. What results is constant unexpected switching between games without being able to prepare and would make for a really good concept to do on a stream or with a bunch of friends over.

My issue is that I'm not sure what would be the smartest way to go about this (or if it would even be possible). I've done programming and scripting in the past so if it comes down to making a frontend to handle the workload I can do that, but then I run into the issue of issuing commands to the emulator, which even if they take them I can't seem to find much documentation on how to issue those commands.

Any thoughts or assistance would be greatly appreciated on this, since I'm stumped. Thanks!

[ulaoulao]

You'd be best to use a front end. You may even find one that does this sort of thing or will add it. I'd talked to the guys over at hyperspin. QuickPlay may also do this but dev time is currently down. If you wanted to code it ground up, you may need to look for api's like Bnes ( part of bsnes ) or Libretro/retroarch.