Hello,
We have discussed this and we are going to improve it, we take all your suggestions in consideration, this is an honest answer not one given to not improve it, we have listened.
We want that people understand that the issue you are having, cause your board is faulty, is the same issue that you will have with an original game on the same board.
People with a working sram and a drained battery will have the same issue on NeoSD than with an original game.
So if you ask me, its not a NeoSD issue, its a faulty sram or a working sram with drained battery issue.
Thanks
Thats right though I don't think you grasp just how common battery drainage is on the NeoGeo. For sure it is not a neoSD issue but there is a problem in the way the NeoSD currently relies on the MVS rechargeable battery for its backupRAM loading and saving to sdcard to work (without good data being overwritten with bad). I know your going to improove it, I did give suggestions for that after all
I think you are making my words a little bigger than I am trying to explain, I'm not being negative in any way and its great that the issues will be addressed going forward. I think its in part because you are not fullty understanding the MVS battery is a rechargeable battery (like a mobile phone). It is designed to discharge and recharge and it discharging is not a fault like I have with my MVS (where it does not recharge at all).
Granted that when this happens regardless of NeoSD or not, data will be lost but what people may not expect to happen is data for the currently loaded game on the NeoSD to also be lost from the SDcard (because it will be overwritten under the current system).
To reproduce the issue I'm trying to highlight is really very easy;
- Get a highscore in a game
- Swap to other game so neosd stores highscrore to sd card.
- Swap back to game with highscore so its loaded into backupRAM from sd card.
(at this point there is a good backram on sdcard and backupram and all is good in the world)
- Let attract mode start and go into testmode and reset the backupram.
(this is to simulate battery discharge or backupRAM corruption as would happen with days or weeks on non use. I think everyone who has used NeoGeo can see how this situation above is not rare with fully working batteries if the neogeo is not used for a while)
- Let system reboot into the games attract mode.
(at this point the save on sdcard is still good but data in backupRAM is reset)
Now this following part is where the NeoSD will go wrong with the current system of loading and saving.
- Flash a new game onto the NeoSD.
(At this point the good data that was on the sdcard is overwritten by the bad/reset data in backupRAM)
This is what I see people will not expect the MVS battery to be causing to data held on the NeoSD SDcard. This is why I suggested as an interiem solution (before a fully working automated system is complete) to have options in the UI to force load or force save backupRAM for the selected game.