These will be available soon. I am modifying the design slightly. These will probably be ready around the same time Mike's PC2Neos are.
Talked to Mike, and we should be able to ship these together. We live about an hour apart, so once things are finalized I can drive a batch over to him for shipment.
Got some new information and video for you guys.....
First off I have to give a big thanks to Brian for giving me a Top Loader. It has certainly made things a lot easier in relation to testing although we have done quite well up to this point. Having the system however has allowed us to polish a few things given I can finally see it all in action myself. Since the last update the following 3 things have been done.
Added RLE compression & real time decompression on the data transfer. This gives a nice speed boost on data that compresses well. Its very touchy at present but hopefully we have the quirks ironed out.
Logo Screens now show when using PC-2-NEO to load a CD based game. Apart from the first PC-2-NEO screen games now look more like they do when they load from an original CD. It makes the experience better if you just want to play a few rounds.
The CD protection has been removed from the bios. This was needed as systems with broken CD drives could still trip it.
Below is a video showing KOF96 loading..... I only realised after that I had a KOF99 CD in the drive as you can tell from the audio.
WOW Raz, I'm speechless.....
I was already measuring some loading times and what I got approx. is this:
Spoiler:
KOF 96 - INITIAL LOAD
NEO CDZ ~26 secs
TOP LOADER ~38-40 secs (didn't spend much time with this one)
PC2NEO TURFDEMO ~20
PC2NEO RAZDEMO ~14 secs or less
1st round
NEO CDZ ~30 secs
TOP LOADER "don't have data yet"
PC2NEO TURFDEMO ~20
PC2NEO RAZDEMO ~13 secs or less
I still have to grab my jaw, but considering those demos and how massive the initial loads usually are in normal systems.... AOF3 and Last Blades can become enjoyable.
I hope that I have some money left soon to grab one with Mike.
Out of curiosity, would it be possible to use the compression algorithm on CDs themselves. (I.E. Have compressed data on the disk that a special bios could read?)
Out of curiosity, would it be possible to use the compression algorithm on CDs themselves. (I.E. Have compressed data on the disk that a special bios could read?)
Some games already do that. (That's what OBJ files are). Its implemented very poorly though and that said it would not be very fast because it would not be done on the fly.
Another new video, this one shows a game uploading from a version of PC-2-NEO on a CD disk.
While you will get the best out of PC-2-NEO using a custom bios it is possible to do some stuff if you do not want to mod the CD system itself. You are somewhat limited though, for example you cannot load CD games via PC-2-NEO when using a boot disk.