openMenu Alpha 1

[ateam]

@megavolt85 I've taken the liberty to fork your repo and hack away at it here: https://github.com/sbstnc/openmenu. This builds just fine on KallistiOS v2.1 already, and I haven't noticed any bugs using the resulting 1ST_READ.BIN on my Dreamcast. Take what you need from it

Very cool!

Quick question...

This change (feat: make L & R triggers jump by letter in line desc style) makes sense, although I feel those wanting such might be better off using the "lettered folder" view (see here: https://youtu.be/71BLpSyzfwQ).
https://github.com/megavolt85/openmenu/ ... 39be1284e7

The other change (chore: make up & down move by a single page in line desc style) has me wondering if users would have to use the left and right d-pad buttons to scroll through and select a game if up/down are now used for pageup/down.
https://github.com/megavolt85/openmenu/ ... 30751a7255

If you continue to work on this fork and bring some nice QOL features along, would you consider allowing these to be configurable options? I realize that introduces added complexity with both A) the options menu and B) reading/writing to VMU save file.

Thanks for sharing your work, and with a convenient container!

[sbstnc]

Personally, I am not a huge fan of the lettered folder view from your video because it adds a layer of indirection. You see, I would have to actually navigate to a letter, <confirm>, browse. If I actually do end up launching a game from the folder this "just" hides nice artwork for the first moment and introduces an additional confirmation step. It becomes worse though if I just want to browse my library, because then I would find myself constantly jumping in and out of folders. Each return action requiring yet another button press. Perhaps I'm just obscenely lazy and weird, but I wouldn't want to deal with the added friction

And yes, the other change basically assumes the user to do finer cursor adjustments with the left and right direction buttons. The idea here really is that I don't like jumping some "random" number of items, like say, 10 items. I cannot anticipate where in the list I will end up, which makes it very hard to position the cursor precisely. The way it's configured now makes navigation very predictable, I jump to a letter, then move to the right page, and lastly position the cursor within the page.

With all that said, I think the complexity to make this configurable isn't too crazy, so yeah, if there's interest I can do it. Also anybody interested is of course welcome to fork this repo and/or raise a pull request. I would like to gauge common interest for these options though before I put in the work.

I do intend to continue working on this project. I actually want to get automated builds and proper releases going there. For that reason I'm also looking at integrating the art and metadata pipeline.

[ateam]

Gotcha, thanks for the reply

While I don't feel the same as you regarding the lettered folder view, I fully understand where you're coming from in terms of feeling it's cumbersome to navigate.

The more options, the better!

[ateam]

I do intend to continue working on this project. I actually want to get automated builds and proper releases going there. For that reason I'm also looking at integrating the art and metadata pipeline.

https://github.com/sbstnc/openmenu/blob ... ain.c#L359

You may want to consider making 3D BIOS a configurable option too (down the line, of course).

I actually disabled it via assembly hack for my own personal use
viewtopic.php?p=189992#p189992

[sbstnc]

That's a great idea! Even though I quite like the looks and features of the 3D BIOS I am not too happy with its performance. I'll definitely have a look at that later.

However, at the moment I am still busy restructuring the repo. I'm pulling in the imagedb and metadb so I can set up a proper automated build process for the whole thing. That's not very complicated but a fair bit of work, so it might take a couple days until I can look into adding more options.

At some point I would also like to refactor larger chunks of code.

[Matsilagi]

I bought a GDEmu recently and managed to get it all working, however, im having a black screen issue on PAL games and i dont have a VGA cable.
Sound works and i somehow by magic managed to make a PAL game run once without blackscreen but i cant reproduce, any tips?