It's a farm/fertilizer joke. Nothing more, nothing less.I'm not sure what you mean. this is a discussion about what we want the Darksoft Multi-game Neogeo cart to be.
There's no bullshit, just wants, needs and wishes.
It's a farm/fertilizer joke. Nothing more, nothing less.I'm not sure what you mean. this is a discussion about what we want the Darksoft Multi-game Neogeo cart to be.
There's no bullshit, just wants, needs and wishes.
CPS2 way of scrolling through 160+ games is indeed tedious - I have to agree.I'm going to make a prediction here.I predict if the Darksoft Multi-game Neogeo cart solely uses an LCD so people have to manually access a list of over 160 games it will fail.....But my question is not rhetorical. Seriously - what is the benefit of having an LCD screen for game selection?
the limit is really about 30 for me. if there were 160 games on the sdcard it would kill me to have to scroll through them on a 16-character 2-line LCD. I'd trim it to 30 and that would be enough for me. Fortunately I mainly only play Vampire Savior and a couple of others.CPS2 way of scrolling through 160+ games is indeed tedious - I have to agree.
Now I hope someone makes a glossy white shell for it.I keep forgetting this is supposed to work for AES too. I guess the lcd isn't really the best option for console use. But also people should not expect this thing to look gorgeous. Apple engineers have no part in designing this thing for Christ's sake. lol.
White would get dirty/discolor too easily, wouldn't it? Black, white, clear, red, green... how about Barbie pink? That'd look great!Now I hope someone makes a glossy white shell for it.I keep forgetting this is supposed to work for AES too. I guess the lcd isn't really the best option for console use. But also people should not expect this thing to look gorgeous. Apple engineers have no part in designing this thing for Christ's sake. lol.
I say invisible. The emperor's new cart.White would get dirty/discolor too easily, wouldn't it? Black, white, clear, red, green... how about Barbie pink? That'd look great!
If I had always listened to all the peopl who told me that this can't be done, I would had never learnt anything from electronics or programming....I was always wondering why such a multi cart hasn't existed, yet. I read that that realizing this card was impossible. The reality, however is that nothing is impossible. The man who says he can't and the other says he can are always right.
What is the difficulty in creating this multi card? I understand that Neo geo game cartridges are huge and consist of two PCBs.
Yeah, I second that...Updates via MicroSD sounds like the way to go. Also not having the LCD is going to make it more friendly for gamers. The idea at the moment is so that if you don't press anything it will load the last game and if you hold 1P when powering it will show the menu.Here's how I understand it:
The NEO-GEO carts use huge PCBs, and two of them connected together. So there's the expense of physically imposing PCBs to develop and produce. We don't have the benefit of a massive corporation bankrolling a run of 10000 pieces, so each one is going to have a pretty severe production cost tied to it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say each pair of PCBs is going to set Darksoft back about $60 to have them produced with the varying components soldered on at the factory, maybe even more than that. The biggest component payouts are going to be the FPGA, flash memory, and RAM. I emphasize flash memory because there needs to be enough on each cart to hold the largest commercially released games, and that's no joke.
Next is using an FPGA that can handle the menu and file system, the bankswitching, and other technicalities. I don't know if different NEO GEO games used different mappers like the NES and SNES do, but I wouldn't be against it. For all I know, the FPGA might need to be quite robust and thus, expensive just from a cost standpoint. We might even be unlucky and require more than one FPGA per flashcart.
Then there is development time. Praise Darksoft, because he already has immense technical knowledge in this area, but he still needs to spend an awful long time just figuring out how things SHOULD work, and then implementing them and testing them. Who wants to spend $350 on a product that is buggy and unreliable, after all? At this point, he's gathering community suggestions for the features desired, and who knows how many of those are practical?
This is no small undertaking, but God I hope this all pans out.
EDIT: Here's a feature request - make the firmware updateable via the SD Card, either by being able to self-flash from the card, or just having the BIOS read from the card a la Everdrives.