I know D-Soft related topics can provoke some strong feelings in here, but heck, it's still a piece of Neo Geo hardware. Anyhow, today I found this in my YouTube subscriptions stream:
I have to say, it's hard not to be impressed by the loading times, but there's are some interface and software design decisions here which absolutely blow my mind, and not in a good way.
Since the cartridge uses volatile memory, any games flashed into the three available slots get wiped on power down. That's OK. Flashing them back takes no time at all. It took 20-something seconds to flash KoF 2003.
The cartridge remembers which games were assigned to which slot and re-flashes them back on power up! Which means getting to the first screen after boot up takes whatever amount of time is needed to populate three slots with games.
Once that is done, you get to the game selection screen. Here you can choose from one of three games that were just flashed and play them directly. This screen is timed. It can go to the main menu after 1 to 9 seconds. In reality, though, you have to wait at least ~12 seconds because you have to wait for the background transition, for the logo to scroll down, and for the Metal Slug hostage to skip on and off the screen.
I really hope all of this can be disabled and the cartridge will be able to boot to the menu directly. Like I said, with loading this fast, who needs the pre-flash on boot up? The biggest game will load in ~21 seconds!
I'm really happy with my NeoSD, but one thing I can appreciate in this cartridge is the MicroSD slot placement. It just makes sense.
Anyway, according to people behind the product, the menu is far from final, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one reacting to these weird procedures on boot up.
I'm curious about the case they'll be using and the AES version of the cartridge.
I have to say, it's hard not to be impressed by the loading times, but there's are some interface and software design decisions here which absolutely blow my mind, and not in a good way.
Since the cartridge uses volatile memory, any games flashed into the three available slots get wiped on power down. That's OK. Flashing them back takes no time at all. It took 20-something seconds to flash KoF 2003.
The cartridge remembers which games were assigned to which slot and re-flashes them back on power up! Which means getting to the first screen after boot up takes whatever amount of time is needed to populate three slots with games.
Once that is done, you get to the game selection screen. Here you can choose from one of three games that were just flashed and play them directly. This screen is timed. It can go to the main menu after 1 to 9 seconds. In reality, though, you have to wait at least ~12 seconds because you have to wait for the background transition, for the logo to scroll down, and for the Metal Slug hostage to skip on and off the screen.
I really hope all of this can be disabled and the cartridge will be able to boot to the menu directly. Like I said, with loading this fast, who needs the pre-flash on boot up? The biggest game will load in ~21 seconds!
I'm really happy with my NeoSD, but one thing I can appreciate in this cartridge is the MicroSD slot placement. It just makes sense.
Anyway, according to people behind the product, the menu is far from final, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one reacting to these weird procedures on boot up.
I'm curious about the case they'll be using and the AES version of the cartridge.