openMenu Alpha 1

[dubcity]

After extensive testing here's what I have seen so far. Menu overall works great, pretty much all my USA and EURO games have artwork. Japanese artwork is still lagging behind and some games like the Japanese version of Sega GT which had working artwork now don't. All of the Atomiswave ports have working artwork now which is a huge plus!

As others have said, the unreleased games like Half-Life and homebrew games still are missing artwork or like in Half-Lifes case show the incorrect art.

Aside from that, as others have pointed out, the main menu does not save when you make changes to it and resets after a reboot. All CDI games I have tried worked fine, including some like NXdoom that I couldn't get working on the previous version. I have also noticed the GDEMU in-game reset doesn't work on the Atomiswave ports or most homebrew games. It works fine on all regular released games. Overall it's working beautifully and all the GDI and CDI games I tested work fine aside from the in-game reset. Really like the missing artwork image now, looks a lot better.

Atomiswave games are originally arcade games with no reset function. The conversions for DC are the same games so no reset. All old homebrew do not have reset function programmed in them since gdemu was not around when they were made. New homebrew from this point on would need the function programmed into them. This is also not a simple task. No one wants to do the grunt work of re-releasing 20 years worth of homebrew for us to have reset. Mrneo240 will need to work out artwork problems with homebrew. Out of all the technical problems you listed this one I am most confident he will fix.

[mrneo240]

Yes, in game reset at least has to "exist" within the thing you're runnig in order to be used.

If your game doesnt have it then theres not much that can be done. I will add it to my homebrew and try to convince others to do the same moving forward.

In another note i added custom theme preferences saving and let you add your own custom images + metadata that if present will replace the existing or be used if present. Instructions to come, its not difficult but you do need a couple tools.

[Ian Micheal]

Yes, in game reset at least has to "exist" within the thing you're runnig in order to be used.

If your game doesnt have it then theres not much that can be done. I will add it to my homebrew and try to convince others to do the same moving forward.

In another note i added custom theme preferences saving and let you add your own custom images + metadata that if present will replace the existing or be used if present. Instructions to come, its not difficult but you do need a couple tools.

I can recompile almost every thing to include the reset function there was never a why to included in the past..

I would say i can compile 80% of all homebrew nothing from bero but most.. and included the functions

[EPe9686518]

Aside from that, as others have pointed out, the main menu does not save when you make changes to it and resets after a reboot

As a quick test, can you try deleting the openMenu settings from the dreamcast bios save manager and seeing if that fixes it?

I think I have an idea how to fix I just haven't encountered this issue before. Thank you for being patient

Just tested it, works perfectly now! Tried it with in-game reset and a full power off and on of the system, the menu retained my settings! With the in-game reset not working on the homebrew/Atomiswave games, just want to be clear, that might just be a GDEMU issue or a game issue and not related to openMenu, I didn't test them that much before so not sure if the in-game reset worked on those titles on regular GDEMU or the previous version of openMenu. All in all every retail release game I have, all betas, alphas, prototypes and unreleased games as well as all homebrew (around 240 or so total) I got on my 400 gig sd card work flawlessly with this menu. Not sure if this is a new feature or if I had a problem with the previous version, but another really nice touch is when you add a GDI game it automatically renames the tracks to the correct naming format for you (track01, track02, etc...). With the last version I had to manually go in and do that for all 240 games which wasn't fun. Great work!

*Update* Just saw the other posts after I submitted this one about the in-game reset. That's what I was originally thinking that the issue might be in regards to the game itself and not the menu. Didn't want it to sound like it might be a issue with openMenu, should have clarified that in my OP. Good to know what the problem is though!

[mrneo240]

I am glad things are going well for you with the menu! That's my goal!

I had written an entire long post that apparently never posted so here's the short version.

- Full release of current (my current, not your current. You will want to grab this release) menu tomorrow or Tuesday with slightly updated DATs.
- Tools+instructions to make your own user DATs (image+meta) that overlay the official ones (user one has higher precedence but will fallback to official)
- next big new features are going to be: categories (configured in GDMenuCardManager), a new UI to show off categories, codebreaker support, built-in widescreen patching.

[fafadou]

Really exciting !
I Nevers imagine, the open menu could avoid some issue with some homebrews.

[megavolt85]

- next big new features are going to be: ..... codebreaker support

I believe that in the future we need to get rid of the codebreaker, we will need to build a cheat engine into the openmenu

[Ian Micheal]

dreambor now when you quit from the game in the menu returns to openmenu and gdemu tested by Dubcity so i recompile all of mine with this as button combo..

[EPe9686518]

Super exciting stuff MrNeo, can't wait to play around with that! It's amazing how far this has come!

[megavolt85]

dreambor now when you quit from the game in the menu returns to openmenu and gdemu tested by Dubcity so i recompile all of mine with this as button combo..

the easiest way to add IGR function to homebrew is to add command to main function

Code: Select all

cont_btn_callback(0, CONT_START | CONT_A | CONT_B | CONT_X | CONT_Y, (cont_btn_callback_t)arch_menu);