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Unified Namco246/Namco 256 'multi' setup - SYS2X6, SD2PSX, ODE v1-3

There should be a banner at the top of the OLED screen when a new update is available - although if you are in a submenu, you won't see it - let me think of a solution for that. And you have to do something to cause a screen refresh - let me think about maybe forcing a screen refresh every 30 seconds or something. I will work on those items tonight.

I will also check the webui on an ipad - I was testing on my iphone and my computer - and everything seemed to work well.

I like the idea of a Favorites FOLDER, instead of a toggle.

For selections in menu - let me check all of them to make sure its consistent. I did them at different times, so its possible its not.

Matt
 
Orakelschaf said:
My 256 is running now. The I/O had some missing solder pads (my fault) - rebuild it and swithing modes is working. Afterwards my 246 stopped working and wasted a couple of hours debugging. Rebuild the I/O, reflashed the pi, changed to a differnt by, checked everything ... unti l checked the ODE3 FW. : 509 ... had a facepalm moment. Flashed back to 508 (which took like 5 tries) and everything started working.

It was already really late yesterday. I only had a fast look at the webui which looks much bettert now!

I checked it again on my old ipad (some issue may not relevant since i dont use a current browser), will do a proper webgui check later:

- the 3 dot menu wont close after opening (clicking on the menu icon again)
- in the Grid view the images are still full page size images. (maybe the grid is not working on that old ipad?)
- in the list view the image is right next to the image. It needs space

- right now the favorites seem to be a toggle. Either full list or favorites. I want both ... just a favorites folder above the list.

- ON the OLED menu in the settings i really get confused about the selection stuff. Sometimes you have to select 2 times and sometimes the selection is white backgrounded
- There should be a "hey there is a new update" somewhere ... can be even just a dot in the upper corner of the Display. Just something which lets me know that i should update (without checking this thread)
Click to expand...

Found the webUI bugs with an older IPad/Safari version - will have a new release up later tonight to address these.

Matt
 
Version 2.20
  • An available update now finds you, on both screens, without you doing anything. The unit checks every few minutes instead of once a day, the cabinet panel shows it within a second, and a web page you already have open grows the red banner by itself rather than waiting for you to tap something. Nothing is ever downloaded or installed without you confirming it, and units in HotSpot mode still do not check at all.
  • Favorites are a folder now, not a filter. A Favorites entry sits at the top of the game list — here and on the cabinet panel — and opens onto the games you have marked. The list behind it never changes, so there is no longer a mode to be left switched on, and no way for a short list to look like missing games. The old Favorites toggle on this page and the Setup → Game List row on the panel are both gone; nothing you have marked is affected, and the folder appears only once something is.
  • The panel now tells an update apart from a fault. Inside a group the top band had room for only a single mark, and the same one stood for both "this unit is off the network" and "there is a new version". A waiting update shows a down arrow; the exclamation mark now means the network, and only the network.
  • A Setup row you cannot press now looks different from one you can. Rows that are only reporting something — Web UI, Version, or WiFi Mode with the radio switched off — draw their value as plain text instead of a filled box, so a press that does nothing is no longer a surprise.
  • After checking for updates from the panel, the screen goes back to the menu by itself instead of sitting on the result until you press something. The Software Update row keeps the answer.
  • Reboot and Shut Down now announce themselves the same way, and each says what to do while it is on screen. Reboot borrowed the look of the screen that appears while a game is being written to the dongle, which made it easy to misread.
Version 2.21
  • The game list now works on older iPads. On an iPad old enough to be stuck on iOS 9, the cover grid was not a grid at all — every cover came out one per row at full page width. The page now falls back to a layout those browsers understand, and looks the same as it always did on newer ones.
  • In List view, the cover and the game title are no longer jammed against each other. The spacing between them relied on a feature only Safari 14.1 and later has, so on anything older it simply vanished — along with the spacing on the Filters and Options pages and in the confirm dialog, which nobody had reported yet.
  • The 3-dot menu closes again when you tap it a second time. On a touchscreen the menu was being held open by a rule meant for a mouse pointer, so the only way to dismiss it was to tap somewhere else on the page. This affected phones and tablets of any age, not just old ones.
Version 2.22
  • Corrected the Help page, which still described the Favorites filter that v2.20 replaced with a folder. It told you to use a Setup → Game List row that no longer exists, said the FAVORITES band meant the panel was filtered, and described a Favorites toggle in this browser that had been removed. Two smaller things had gone stale with it: the panel band now has two marks rather than one (an exclamation for the network, a down arrow for a waiting update), and the unit checks for updates every few minutes rather than once a day.
  • Nothing about how the unit behaves has changed in this release — only what the Help page says about it.

Let me know if that fixes your ipad browsing situation @Orakelschaf - I can't recreate here because I don't have an old ipad, but my friend Claude thinks these fixes will help you out.

Matt
 
Last edited:
Made some changes and a couple of releases:

The master/slave setting is gone​

Every game in the list used to carry an odemode value — master or
slave — and on every load the unit sent it to the disc drive emulator
as an interface set command. That setting has been removed: the
column, the command, and everything in between.

It was removed because it turned out not to do anything here. Every
enabled game on both boards was loaded with the command skipped, one at a
time, and the result recorded:

  • Namco System 246 — 70 of 72 loaded normally.
  • Namco System 256 — 65 tested, 62 loaded normally.
The four that did not come up fail the same way with the command put
back, so none of them are down to this. Whatever mode the drive emulator
is in once it has been told which disc to use, it is already the right
one.

I *think* the master/slave was always a red herring anyway - so removed that complexity.

I *am* having some issues with 2 games on the 246 (wangan) side and about 3 games on the 256 side (zoids) that seem to not be loading consistently... will still work on that and see if I can nail it down (with the sd2psx - the sys2x6 works across the board).

Also - put some more logic to truly detect if the disk select worked, at times the ODE gets frozen - so should be able to detect that more now.
 
after a lot of testing - I think I have everything working now - including the few games that weren't. For some reason - when selecting a card and a channel (per the original link for the sd2psx layout) - it fails on a small number of games. But if every dongle is channel 1 on its own card, it works. This means that I need to create new images (will be 2.25) and get those uploaded, and for those few folks who have already been testing (@Orakelschaf) - you will need to update the sd card on your sd2psx with the new layout here (https://mega.nz/file/tnA0EZwB#XDX895pPr4Y7W3D_e0oH08usaOOR2LVWAsRdBrB-H9A). When you update to 2.25 it will tell you on the web interface to confirm you have done this before it goes to normal operation.

The reason for this is that I have no way of telling from the serial interface what is on the SD2PSX card (can't do a DIR, for example, or anything) - so no way for me to tell if you are using the V2 layout.

For those who are just reading this - you don't have to do anything all the images will be autoset for this.

Matt
 
I am working right now on adding some commands to the sd2psx that will give more information like what firmware version, getting a directory listing (see above challenge where I couldn't tell the layout on the sd2psx card), etc. as well as try and run down the issue where I have to issue a reset twice to get the games to load. If I can get things working with some firmware tweaks - I will send the code changes over to the developer so they can approve and merge into their codebase.

But - aside from that - 2.25 seems to be pretty stable right now with the sd2psx!
 
Welllllll - master/slave is back (a little) - it turns out that on the 246, some games REALLY do need to run in slave mode. On the 256 - they all run in master mode (at least with tattibogle's ODE).

So I did a big change there, as well as building a new firmware for the sd2psx that gets rid of the "double reset/boot" when using that - and also adds in some features like a stat command over serial, and the ability to do a directory listing - this makes it easier (for example) to validate if you have the right V2 sd2psx layout that is very important for stability.

Go ahead and upgrade to the latest version (2.28 as of right now). Once el_isra looks at the code I submitted to him and hopefully integrates that into a new firmware release, I will udpate my front page with that - but right now everything works fine even with the 1.40 firmware.

Some more small UI stuff - there is now a filter for US/JPN/World/Asia as well as a "back" at the bottom of every list now.

Matt
 
Last update for a bit as I will be traveling for the next 2 weeks for work.

Still pending:

  • SD2PSX firmware collab to clear up some errors I worked around
  • picoIDE hardware arrival

V2.39 is the current version - it is stubbed out now so that when the PicoIDE arrives, I can get that wired up and start doing some testing.

Remember how before when switching games it seemed random but sometimes you just had to power cycle the device and it booted up fine? Well, I think I narrowed that down to the ODE getting locked up - IF you dropped the Namco into reset when it was serving up data (like a streaming attract video). The behaviour you will see now is that after a game is selected, it will start to poll the ODE (V2 is slower than V3) and when there is a 300ms gap in activitiy it will pounce and do the reset - it has a 5 minute countdown timer for this to happen in, none of the attract modes last longer than that. This seems to have cleared up like 95% of the weird issues. There are still some games that are just a bit finicky though.

Did exhaustive sweep tests of all games on 246 and 256 using both Tattibogle's V2 and V3 ode.

Entirely gone are the blue screen boot errors (or 99% gone) and IMO the system is much more stable now.

Matt
 
Small 2.40 update - was chatting with @electric_monk and he gave me another command to try and reset the IDE interface, instead of having to wait so long for a lull - works PERFECTLY.

Changing games is quick again, on every game. The unit waits a few seconds for a gap in the emulator's disc traffic, resets the board either way, and then tells the emulator to reset its IDE interface - an undocumented Tattiebogle command that clears the stuck state (ODE Busy) a reset in the middle of a read used to leave behind, the one that needed a power cycle. Proven on a V2 and a V3, then a full 65-title regression sweep on a System 246 with the V2: every game passed, the average wait before a change dropped from 17 seconds to under 3, the worst from three minutes to twenty seconds, and no power cycle was needed. The five-minute wait and the "no safe moment" power-cycle message are gone; a reboot waits the same few seconds.

Matt
 
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