Here are some of my ideas for future upgrades of the PowerPak
* Do not use the entire screen for filebrowsing. The top/bottom disappears on my widescreen (PAL) tv and I have to manually pick 4:3 mode.
* Implement B-button for cancel loading. If I want to load a game and selects the wrong one by mistake there is no way of going back(?) with resetting the console.
* Pro Action Replay support if possible
oRBIT2002 wrote:
* Do not use the entire screen for filebrowsing. The top/bottom disappears on my widescreen (PAL) tv and I have to manually pick 4:3 mode.
The title safe area on a 16:9 PAL TV that thinks it's getting a letterboxed signal is roughly 192 pixels tall (288 line PAL signal * 3/4 for widescreen * 90% TSA factor). Coincidentally, this was also the title safe area specified by Atari for VCS 2600 games on NTSC TVs, back in the late 1970s when people still had a lot of 1960s TVs with rounded corners.
I also am having trouble with browsing. While the TV I have isn't all that old, probably 199x, I'm missing the top row, as well as the cursor when it's not in the middle of the list.
The B-button idea is good, too. Even though I knew the controls going in, I still wished that would work. Maybe have be goto ../ in the file browser, too.
Just my 2 cents..
Also - I'm going to be looking though the code tonight to see if I can figure this out myself, despite no experience in any nes programming (outside of nsf's) as of yet. At least I have some programming experience, and I know I learn best the hard way
-- Never mind about that.. I just realized the code I thought I saw was actually for mapper dev.
I asked earlier and evidently the Pro Action Replay may over-write the PowerPak BIOS.
I have no problem with the position of the menu but with longer file names it cuts off too much of the text witch sometime makes a bit difficult to choose the version of game I would like
The feature I'd like most is a way to see the rest of really long filenames.
I suggested to bunnyboy before about truncating the middle of a long file name instead of the end, with an ellipsis marking the point of truncation. If the first and last 12 characters or so were displayed, it would in most cases be sufficient to distinguish between titles with long and similar names. I don't think it's feasible to implement the display of full filenames, given NES limitations. After all, you can always truncate the filename before uploading to the CF card if necessary.
Restricting to 192 pixels vertically seems excessive, but it may be better to err on the side of accessibility here. I personally have gone back and forth on this issue ever since seeing the demo video posted some weeks back.
#1: In game menu, add a header info view button to help with debugging
#2: Set the B button to go back to last screen or add a link in the game menu
#3: Filename fix would be nice, I like the idea of dropping middle characters (unless you can set the filename that the cursor is pointed to to scroll)
Any mapper related issues can be fixed by members currently, but not sure if we have access to the menu interface for modification (if we do, then I guess we can all get to work
)
My main request is the source for the boot ROM, it'd be great to customize the menu any way you see fit. I'm sure many of the members here are capable of improving it and that would be beneficial for everyone, including bunnyboy, it's one less thing he has to deal with!
BootGod wrote:
My main request is the source for the boot ROM, it'd be great to customize the menu any way you see fit. I'm sure many of the members here are capable of improving it and that would be beneficial for everyone, including bunnyboy, it's one less thing he has to deal with! :)
The boot ROM doesn't have the menu code. It's somewhere in the drivers on the CF card. The boot ROM only does low-level stuff like FAT16/32 parsing (kind of like the FDS BIOS).
dvdmth wrote:
BootGod wrote:
My main request is the source for the boot ROM, it'd be great to customize the menu any way you see fit. I'm sure many of the members here are capable of improving it and that would be beneficial for everyone, including bunnyboy, it's one less thing he has to deal with!
The boot ROM doesn't have the menu code. It's somewhere in the drivers on the CF card. The boot ROM only does low-level stuff like FAT16/32 parsing (kind of like the FDS BIOS).
That's awesome that it's on the CF card instead, would make testing new stuff out a hell of a lot easier. It would appear the menu code would have to be in amongst the files B,E,I,N,O,Q, and S.map. If we could get a rundown of what each of those files needs to do and if they have any special format, that would be great.
If people start adding new features, someone please add the "hold A" thing for half a second or so by default since I have to do it every time I power on
kyuusaku wrote:
If people start adding new features, someone please add the "hold A" thing for half a second or so by default since I have to do it every time I power on :o
That would require a boot ROM change. Bunnyboy will be very hesistant in making boot ROM changes, not only because of the CopyNES requirement, but also because changing the boot ROM code can potentially require an update to all CF drivers, since there's no guarantee that subroutines will remain at the same start addresses (bunnyboy should've used a jump table...).
Forgot one thing, automatic creation of .sav-files would be a nice thing.
You mean PC-side or NES-side creation? PC-side creation would require just walking the directory tree and creating a .sav for each .nes that has the battery bit set. NES-side creation, on the other hand, would require a FAT implementation that supports writing to the directory and the sector list. But if Doctor PC Jr. can do it...
tepples wrote:
You mean PC-side or NES-side creation? PC-side creation would require just walking the directory tree and creating a .sav for each .nes that has the battery bit set. NES-side creation, on the other hand, would require a FAT implementation that supports writing to the directory and the sector list. But if Doctor PC Jr. can do it...
On the NES-side.
Another cool idea (perhaps impossible I dunno...) would be a software-pause mode sort of.
Imagine pressing a certain combination of buttons to switch back to BIOS menu to pick a new game, or, perhaps being able to browse/edit RAM (for simple hacking purposes perhaps).
The software pause is definitely possible because the powerpak does something similar when it detects reset. The only difference would be that it would need to nondestructively interrupt the game (is there any free FPGA RAM after 4-screen/EXRAM?). If it could do that, it could probably real time save as well which allows for cheat finding!
Action replay codes would be possible I think with a special SRAM file and new FPGA config file which can disable GG codes (perhaps the current one can?). You'd need game genie codes which patch the NMI vector to point to code in SRAM which modifies the RAM values you want, then disables the game genie, reads the real NMI vector, enables game genie, and jumps to the real vector. It'd be nice if the bootROM could set all that up for you though.
I think it would be nice to have a way to load/save cheats from/to a file which can be enabled/disabled through a GUI, AFAIK this is how all modern cheat systems work.
It would also be nice to use all the free logic in mappers to expand the number of cheats possible.
It would be REALLY nice to have reconfigurable hotkeys to enable/disable the Game genie but this doesn't require a bootrom update :)
A button combo (like select+start+a+b) to trigger a reset would be nice (although I was planning on building one using hardware
)
Would it be possible to update the BIOS from a file on the CF card?
kyuusaku wrote:
it would need to nondestructively interrupt the game
I don't know... executing extra code while the games run (to check for the specific button sequence) might break them, even if if it's just a little bit of code... So I don't think this is such a good idea.
tokumaru wrote:
kyuusaku wrote:
it would need to nondestructively interrupt the game
I don't know... executing extra code while the games run (to check for the specific button sequence) might break them, even if if it's just a little bit of code... So I don't think this is such a good idea.
No extra code would be run until the game is halted, button checking can be done in hardware by adding a serial load shift register decoded to the controller ports. The outputs would be XNORed with a programmable button register then those outputs could be ANDed to trigger a match.
kyuusaku wrote:
button checking can be done in hardware by adding a serial load shift register decoded to the controller ports.
OK, so this would be for a possible future version of the PowerPak, one with a connector hanging from it that you could plug between the controller and the NES, right?
The cartridge can technically "read" the controller on his own as long as the game does, by watching reads and writes to $4016 (or $4017). Maybe this could be done with the FPGA inside the power pak, but then it would require the game to read the controller buttons required for the combo periodically so that the cartridge could check them too.
The problem would be for game using the same combo of buttons to do something : This would break their compatibiliy with the power pak.
Bregalad wrote:
The cartridge can technically "read" the controller on his own as long as the game does, by watching reads and writes to $4016 (or $4017). Maybe this could be done with the FPGA inside the power pak, but then it would require the game to read the controller buttons required for the combo periodically so that the cartridge could check them too.
Exactly, but every
game does this, BIOS and other things may not, but why would you need to cheat with them?
Bregalad wrote:
The problem would be for game using the same combo of buttons to do something : This would break their compatibiliy with the power pak.
That is why you make it programmable, it's not likely that any game uses every combination of buttons.
Quote:
Exactly, but every game does this, BIOS and other things may not, but why would you need to cheat with them?
Every game does this when it exept the player to input something trough the controller. With games like 'Contra' you're sure the game checks for the controller at least once per frame, but with game like 'Déjà Vu' I wouldn't be so sure.
Not to mention tech demos doing only showing some graphical thing and not touching the controller would be unable to pause.
Quote:
That is why you make it programmable, it's not likely that any game uses every combination of buttons.
I don't have any in mind, but technically this is an annoyance : You may just write a NES programm and check how it reacts to buttons. On emulators, they cannot take more than ~3 keyboard touches at the same times, and on the real hardware the power pak would interface and change the results.
if these things are possiple would it be possiple to store the CPU state and the rest and create a save state after a console reset?
sence this is a wish list an optional feature I would like is being able to reset the system and end up at the game's startup screen instead of being kicked back to the powerpack menu
That'd be hot, reset is basically an interrupt so the power pak could save the pushed adress and store them in on-cartridge-WRAM, then save all the content of the internal RAM to the on-cartridge-WRAM, then bankswitch other nametables and pattern tables in, but remaning the sate of the old somewhere, and you get hardware savestates.
As long as those things are options that can be completely disabled (via the BIOS?), then I'm all for it. Blindly applying things like soft reset button combos to every game--even a simple button check in NMI--could easily break those that ride the bleeding edge of stability.
Bregalad wrote:
I don't have any in mind, but technically this is an annoyance : You may just write a NES programm and check how it reacts to buttons. On emulators, they cannot take more than ~3 keyboard touches at the same times
That's why I don't play NES emulators with a keyboard anymore. Instead, I use a Nintendo brand N64 controller through a USB adapter.
loopy wrote:
I agree, I think hijacking reset is annoying.
Seconded.
The problem with having reset go straight to the game is that you don't have a way to to save battery RAM. Having to hold Reset for a second to get to the boot ROM might work, though I don't know if that would be possible on the PowerPak (depends on whether or not the reset behavior is hard-wired on the board).
Maybe an alternative would be to have an option to restart the last game played, available from the boot screen. The PowerPak would store the location of the last selected ROM file and/or the last selected battery RAM file somewhere on the CF card. On power-up and reset, it can use the data to determine what was last played and give an option to continue using that ROM/RAM. The only catch is that the PowerPak will need to verify that the ROM/RAM files are still present on the card.
Having the last used battery RAM file stored on the CF card will particularly come in handy during saving, since you don't have to reselect the .sav file to use.
Quote:
The problem with having reset go straight to the game is that you don't have a way to to save battery RAM. Having to hold Reset for a second to get to the boot ROM might work, though I don't know if that would be possible on the PowerPak (depends on whether or not the reset behavior is hard-wired on the board).
So, if would you like to have just passed a long and tedious dungeon of
Dragon Quest III on the power pak and save, then want to save your save on the CF cart and hold the reset button for 0.999 sec, and then constat with horror that everything is lost ? Or would the SRAM content be intact on reset ?
Since it never loses power by just pressing reset you should be able to hold it down an hour without losing the S-RAM
note: I understand sarcasm
kyuusaku wrote:
The feature I'd like most is a way to see the rest of really long filenames.
Cosign. I've been having to rename some of my roms so I can figure out which are which.
Perhaps holding Select could scroll the rest of the currently-selected filename onto the screen? Sounds simple enough...
Wii News Channel automatically scrolls the selected item back and forth. You could do that, or you could do Winamp style wrap scrolling.
It would also be nice for the files to scroll, not the arrow, so that we don't have the issue of the top lines being cut off. I often have to guess what is there when I only have a few files on the card.
Quote:
It would also be nice for the files to scroll, not the arrow, so that we don't have the issue of the top lines being cut off. I often have to guess what is there when I only have a few files on the card.
Also, maybe highlighted text for selection instead of the pointer, which I can't see half the time.. My TV sucks..
Sometimes the games appear in alphabetical order after the root and current directories, othertimes they appear in the middle of the games. Can this be fixed so that the first game following the root and current directories is the game in that directory that appears first in alphabetical order.
Probably the PowerPak is just reading the directory list in the CF card, and not sorting filenames in any way. Although it is a bit annoying, I don't think I'd want to wait the time it would take for our poky ol' NES CPU to sort hundreds of name strings.
Bubble sort algorithm is quite fast when written correctly, even with a high number of elements. Also, why don't you separate your ROMs in different folders (by series, genres, companies or whathver ?)
The best solution I think would be to have an option to sorts the FAT, not sort every filename in real time especially with the LFNs.
Bregalad wrote:
Bubble sort algorithm is quite fast when written correctly, even with a high number of elements. Also, why don't you separate your ROMs in different folders (by series, genres, companies or whathver ?)
I do sort them in folders, and copy them all to the CF card in sequence. Windows does the job of writing to the card with the files in (mostly) alphabetical order, and everyone's happy.
here is something witch would be kinda nice
if the ROM info was displayed on the screen right before you start the game
Maybe mapper 165 could be implemented so we could play Buzz and Waldog on a real system. That would make my day.
Has everyone put their PowerPak's aside and forgotten aboot them, or am I missing out on some alternative forum that discusses it more.
Seem like nothing much has changed in a while no new mappers no new discussions.
I think it's just rather difficult to design mappers for, that's all.
(I'm probably dreaming here:) I would like to see a Famicom cart version of the PowerPak much in the shape of the FDS RAM cart. With the exception that it would have a socket on top to attach the RAM cart, Game Genie style. (An adapter in this shape with a ribbon cable to a 72-pin PowerPak cart would work too, but be less elegant.) This would be dual-purpose:
#1, It would be possible, to my understanding, to load FDS games in lieu of the RAM cart, with full support for added FDS hardware functionality (like the additional audio hardware). There could be a switch on the unit to simulate flipping the disk sides when prompted. This would save a good bit of wear and tear on the moving parts of an FDS. Although, it's unlikey to made I imagine, due to lack of demand and needing to make a connector that matches the FDS RAM cart/drive assembly cord.
#2, It would no longer be necessary to switch the RAM cart out to play regular games, and plug it back in for use of the FDS. Less hassle, less wear and tear. Why Nintendo didn't put a cartridge slot on the FDS RAM cart is beyond me.
My idea would be for the PowerPak to have priority and you would select "Boot External Cartridge" or "Boot FDS" or what have you from that menu.
Probably won't ever be made. But I like the idea.
I just wish my PowerPak would eventually arrive at my mailbox.
But considering the months that have passed, it's probably just wishful thinking.
How long ago did you order and was it listed as 'in stock' when you ordered it?.. otherwise I'd be very upset if I were you. I really hope this isn't a common problem; I'm not paying $130+ for a piece of hardware that may never arrive.
At least you live in the US... I waited forever for mine to arrive, and the price almost doubled because of taxes. This is why I did the resitor fix myself. Don't know what I'll do about the ROM update though. Desoldering the chip to put it in my EPROM programmer and soldering it back seems a bit too dangerous...
Actually, I was promised to get one for free after leading Bunnyboy in the right direction regarding the graphics bugs. So I can't really be that upset, just disappointed. This was at the end of June IIRC. When a lot of time had passed, I asked on #nesdev if it had been shipped, at which time Bunnyboy offered me to wait for the second-generation one instead. Again, I waited a long time, and the next time I asked on #nesdev, he said it was already shipped, but that no kind of tracking number was available because that would have been too expensive.
Since I didn't want to nag, I waited for yet another long period. I then mailed him asking about it, after which he MSG:ed me on IRC saying it had been returned as unclaimed, and asking if I had gotten a customs notice. I told him no such notice had arrived and later mailed him repeating the same thing and asking if he would consider re-shipping it. This was one week ago, and I haven't gotten any response to my mail, nor have I been able to contact him after numerous /MSG:s on #nesdev.
I have tried to contact the customs office seeing if they screwed up, and according to their database, no package has been sent to my address. If it was sent as a letter instead, the post office is responsible, but they cannot check this with my name alone, some sort of posting receipt has to be available.
But well, I haven't lost any money, just haven't gotten the prize I was promised to receive. So I guess there's nothing for me to cry about. Still, a promise to deliver is a promise. So if I do purchase a PowerPak, it'd have to be second-hand from someone who's a bit more responsive. Betting that a new order will show up just because there's money involved the second time seems risky.
But who knows, maybe there is a good explanation for all of this...
Bananmos wrote:
But who knows, maybe there is a good explanation for all of this...
Yeah, that the swedish post serice is a joke. Once I bought something from USA and waited almost two month for it to arrive, then I called to see if they might have forgotten to tell me it had arrived. To my supprise they told me that they were just preparing to send it back to USA! O_O
Another time they lost my shoes - I had a pair of shoes at my parents house that I asked if they could post for me and so they did.. but the shoes never turned up.
Quote:
Yeah, that the swedish post serice is a joke.
So is the Swedish customs department. They don't even bother telling you when they snatch your stuff. They just send it back (if the sender accepts the charges) or destroy it (or keep it for themselves for all I know).
Still sucks that you didn't get your powerpak though. With 20/20 hindsight you probably should've offered a couple of bucks to get it shipped with some trackable service.
Mine arrived promptly, but of course the idiot mailman had just stuck the package in my mailbox even though it was too large to fit. Luckily it was still there by the time I got home.
> Still sucks that you didn't get your powerpak though. With 20/20 hindsight
> you probably should've offered a couple of bucks to get it shipped with
> some trackable service.
Yeah, I guess I should have, and would have if it didn't cost > $40 or something. But I kind of just assumed that a tracking number would be available, so it wasn't much of an active decision on my part.
YAAAY! My PowerPak finally arrived, just in time for christmas! Thanks Bunnyboy - all is forgiven! Winter is the best time to play NES games anyway. :P
Ironically, the customs department charged me for... $40. Guess I should've picked a smaller random monetary sum to name in this thread. ;)
congrats.
gannon wrote:
#1: In game menu, add a header info view button to help with debugging
#2: Set the B button to go back to last screen or add a link in the game menu
#3: Filename fix would be nice, I like the idea of dropping middle characters (unless you can set the filename that the cursor is pointed to to scroll)
Any mapper related issues can be fixed by members currently, but not sure if we have access to the menu interface for modification (if we do, then I guess we can all get to work
)
my 2cents...
break in the middle where the cursor is located dynamically
either that or break off each end using cursor horizontal pos like a scroll bar position.
I now keep wishing for a utility which will automatically create .sav files in your .nes collection.
So I wrote myself
one. Comes with
source code.
Bananmos wrote:
I now keep wishing for a utility which will automatically create .sav files in your .nes collection.
So I wrote myself
one. Comes with
source code.
great. now I don't have to
thnx.