Mitsurugi-w
Arcade Admini-Moderator
3 hours ago+7
At this point the menu isn't going to change a whole lot. We have done our best to accommodate what people have asked for and like they say, you can't make everyone happy. The menu experience is customizable to suit your wants. You can have it go directly to the games list after hitting start on the loaded games list or have it go into the menu choices. You can boot directly to slot 1 without any button presses. You can now boot to slot 2 or 3 with a single button press. You can choose to have menu music or not, or change the song that plays as I did for this last video. You can turn off or on animations in the game select screen. With a few settings changes the game list navigates no different than NeoSD.
One thing that won't change is the few seconds the cart needs to boot and test/set itself up due to the nature of the design (use of ram). Even with the three largest games it won't take more than 40 seconds to boot. And that is completely your CHOICE as well. You don't HAVE to use all three slots. You can choose to use one and have it boot quicker. I purposely included the NeoSD boot times after the games are loaded so people couldn't bitch about it.
Now, most of the issues you are noticing on the games is mechanical in nature. These protos are not the best. We very early on found that the interconnects needed to be changed. Our protos do not have any mechanical upgrades. This causes the lines you see sometimes. Seating the cart differently changes that.
We've even had one tester experience major issues that the other testers could not reproduce on their cart with the same pcb type in certain games. We know this is a problem with the design of the proto. We are ordering a small batch of final run design to verify everything similar to how we did with F3. After everything is verified we will go into full production.
Most if not all of the sound issues in the video can be attributed to my pcb. It has some sound issues as can be heard when I boot the pcb in the vid. It happens with regular Neo carts too.
The ability to boot directly to a slot was kind of "an afterthought" I guess. It was not intended when we began designing. It is a feature added because it was requested. Yes, we have the intention of allowing you to delete slots from the menu instead of doing it on the computer. That will be in a future update but for now the most important thing is to have a product that can go into production and function as originally intended. We are pretty much there.
Due to the sheer amount of pcb revisions the Neo had there will certainly need to be fixes in future FW updates just like with the NeoSD. It will all be sorted in the end.
We will make this the best product we can.
MudGuts83
Beginner
3 hours ago
Thanks for the update video! Looks great, I can't wait to pre-order.
pulstarx
Beginner
2 hours ago
Well currently you guys have several small issues with the software that add up to a bigger problem for some of us. @daithidownunder described it best.
I'm sure a lot of awkward transitions and load times can be cut too. For instance not loading the music if it's off and not loading the gfx if the menu is set to simple list. Not having the menu ever pop up when it directly boots in a game. Showing which game is currently loaded and some simple percentage number. Implementing that stuff only takes a few hours but helps a lot. Every seconds counts in the startup process.
I would also turn off the MVS hardware test (jumpled greenscreen) with the cheat bios.
deibit
Professional
An hour ago+1
why do you need a percentage counter if the load takes only a few seconds?
Mitsurugi-w likes this.
pulstarx
Beginner
54 minutes ago
Why not? A progress bar is of course even better but takes 20 minutes to implement instead of 5 minutes.
It's important to show progress, that the device didn't hang itself while starring on a black screen.
Mitsurugi-w
Arcade Admini-Moderator
36 minutes ago
And some people wonder why we don't like menus.....just can't seem to please some of you. Jeez. LOL. We love listening to your suggestions but at this time we have let this project get bogged down long enough. We can continue to tweak things but we aren't going to delay this anymore. We can always update things later and also someone can write their own software when we release the source in a year or so. Menu updates will continue as long as needed, however. I've worked with the menu as is quite a bit and it works well.
You may think changes don't take long. The fact is that those of us working on this thing are on three different continents. Some of us have big time zone differences, etc. Never in the same room. All with real jobs and family to deal with first. We have a team on this. No one person does everything. Some of the people working on this want to be anonymous but you would be surprised to find out who they are.
This menu is the culmination of what most people wanted.
Remember, we originally were not going to do a menu at all. So our first goal is to release a good, functional cart with great load times and a menu that works well and can have options adjusted. Can we offer a minimalist menu in the future? That's a definite maybe.
deibit
Professional
27 minutes ago
i see your point with the progress bar, but if it takes longer than 1 minute its obvious that something went wrong.
Imagine everybody would implement a counter for every short transition....
A progress bar is meaningful in a context where it takes very long to finish and where the probability to mess something up is big.. Like Windows installation, compressing a movie file, rendering a 3d model, load a game in the NeoSD etc etc. .
Mitsurugi-w
Arcade Admini-Moderator
25 minutes ago+1
I just talked to Darksoft, if any of you that are unhappy with the menu as is has coding experience and would like to help implement some of your ideas into the menu we would love to invite you onto the team. It can be your own little project.
Also, if you have VERY SPECIFIC ideas of what needs to be changed then please list them and we will try to see what we can do in an update in the near future.
aha2940 likes this.
SNK-NEO-GEO
Professional
5 minutes ago
I am going to use the NeoMuilty like an everdrive and turn off all the features. A simple text list of games (no music, no video, no animation) and select a game and load. The extra slots are nice and all to have more games but at the end of the day, I just want to select a game load and play
.. We all know all the Neogeo games, who needs videos and animation when we could be playing in seconds.. I love the Everdrives for that simplicity.
aha2940
Intermediate
2 minutes ago
deibit wrote:
i see your point with the progress bar, but if it takes longer than 1 minute its obvious that something went wrong.
Imagine everybody would implement a counter for every short transition....
A progress bar is meaningful in a context where it takes very long to finish and where the probability to mess something up is big.. Like Windows installation, compressing a movie file, rendering a 3d model, load a game in the NeoSD etc etc. .
I think the progress bar is a nice touch, to help you keep in mind that the machine is working. Progress bars are not needed for very small tasks, like loading roms on any other multicart (they take like a second) but this is neo-geo, nothing about this console is regular (LOL) so progress bars would be useful, even if they last "only" 20 seconds.
noonan2678
Beginner
A moment ago
Thanks for the ongoing commitment... Agreed that getting our hands on this is far more desirable than further software tweaks.
Mentioned before, but this is the one from my perspective (similar to SNK-NEO-GEO):
Ability to boot direct to the games list, select single game and launch.
Bypass slots and slot selection, RAM dumped on exit so nothing loaded at startup.
