Z'OMG... I am getting one...
xROTx
PS. Necro Bump...
EDIT: Loads so so fast...
Hello,
I would like to give my personal opinion about the video. As you know, this is not a neutral opinion cause i have my own personal interests, but its my personal opinion, not Terraonion´s opinion at all.
I think the most interesting things on the video are what you cant see :
a) the neogeo itself or the flashcart itself.
Why not show it, even if it has wires or good knows what hanging ?
I can only think about two reasons :
a1) Its not running on a neogeo at all
a2) loading is done by an LCD again.
b) there is no sound :
Thats pretty curious no one said anything about that. It may sound minor, but not having sound at all means they canï½´t make it work as today.
Now my opinion about the whole project :
We knew it was not possible to flash a game such kof2003 under 10 secconds using SRAM, its not even possible on paper.
You can only know how fast flashing is going to be once you have it running, real life always tend to be worst than paper, based on our past experiences.
Since day one, we knew this multislot idea was a nosense idea. On the best scenario you need 1 minute to flash a big game into SRAM, if you want to flash 4 games, you need 4 minutes. You power off the board and you have 4 minutes of flashing again, so where is the advantage on having multiple games on SRAM ? SRAM is nice if you just flash one game and its small enough. NeoGeo catalog is full of big games, this is not SNES where the biggest game is 8mb, kof2003 is 96mbs
Also, it seems that Darksoft pretends to sell something totally incomplete saying : NEOSD guys shipped something incomplete and they fixed it with a firmware update.
Yes, we shipped the first batch of NEOSD with ALL games running, we just had to adjust timmings to make it work on 4slots boards, but adjusting timmings to make it work into one board while ALL games are complete working fine on the rest of the boards is much different than make something that dosent works, to work.
Based on our personal experience, you need hardware changes until the last game is running.
At this stage (remember, it was going to be done in 3 weeks since August 2016), to show a dark video with the smallest game running and no sound, tells me i was right with my initial conclusion. They (darksoft and his workers) have no clue about what they are doing, and you can notice that if you check his forum about the actual CPS2 bugs that still remain unfixed since years.
I Think darksofts MAIN issue is the same as allways :
He can´t code, others do the job, so he just sells dreams while running forward. As long as you have patience to move your customers forward until the infinite, thats ok if you can live with it.
This french guy on the video does his part the best he can. The polish guy that designed the PCB did the same and both them tell darksoft it will be working soon, to not hear him again, get payed and move forward.
As darksoft knows nothing about coding, he thinks what his workers say may end being true, atleast he wishes that.
Fact again is that you donï½´t know if it works until you have it working.
To my eyes they havent designed the product with a single vision from the beginning, the PCB guy did what he thought it would work and the coder is doing what he can with the current hardware design. None of them took the time to analize the nosense of the 4games loading using SRAM, since day one. So now he has a lot of promises he will not be able to accomplish, atleast not with the current hardware design, for sure.
I am pretty sceptic about anything good will come from this, i am just taking as reference his past products (that to my eyes are a dissaster of bugs, wires, reworks, rasperbis and lcds) an that after 5 months, since Agust 2016, he still cant even have the smallest NeoGeo game running with sound.
Just for reference, we had every game running except the protected ones 5 months after we started working on NEOSD, It was about 200 games or so.
There is no reason to just have a regular game running and not the rest, atleast not from a neogeo game protection side. They only reason he may only have been able to run the smallest game if the video is not fake, is a hardware design problem.
From a sales point of view, I think Its a pretty bad idea to sell an incomplete thing telling your customers that you will make it work with a firmware update. There are things you cant just fix with a firmware update cause those end needing hardware changes. Pretty bad idea to have your customers waiting to make something you have sold to them, to work.
I also think its a pretty bad idea to promise future features when you can稚 even get the smallest game running with sound, I wonder if this is playable at all
Finally, just want to say good luck to him and his customers. Time will tell if I am wrong or not.
Thanks