So I have tested it too and it's another awesome emulator.
Few things:
- I can confirm some scramble graphic on the left on the screen
I also noticed some scramble graphics on the left of the screen
Reviving some old post / tech discussion about the subject in the past, horizontal resolution is quite tricky with this emulator and console. Neo Geo games can be 320x224 or 304x224 (
source), Jacobeian mentions that then there is no indication how the game can switch between the 2 modes, and the emulator does not emulate that yet. But also, according to the
Neo Geo Programmers Guide, 320x224 is the display area, adding a PAL mode where the size of display is 320x256, which he speculated is to reduce the size of vertical borders, as PAL TV signal has more lines than NTSC. It seems that games are supposed to put black tiles themselves, it's apparently not done by hardware automatically like with other consoles.
vigi_lante also mentioned that Neo Geo games were meant to be used with an arcade monitor, which you can easily adjust the vertical and horizontal size of the screen (unlike a regular TV). So, for the few games that use 320 pixels, the arcade operator can resize the screen in order to display all the pixels.
Baseball Stars in MAME:
Metal Slug displays garbage pixels in that area (see botton right):
Even the creator of NeoCD-Wii (Wiimpathy) got fed up with this video situation, so he, understandably, left it as-is. So in the end, I had to make a decision about the video, with a compromise between some small scrambled graphics that could be cropped by the overscan, or not showing them (cropping) and lose pixels on the left side permanently.
You would never notice in games like
Metal Slug, but the minute you start playing
Xeno Crisis and see the intro, you'll immediately notice the dialogues being cut at the left side (score is affected too, as it is glued to the left border, the CRT overscan area).
6. When designing for NEO-GEO, important characters should not be placed within
the left most and right most 16-dot areas, nor' in the top and bottom 8-dot areas.
These areas may not be visible on some television monitors.
7. For Multi-Video Systems, 8 dots on both the left and right sides should be
masked by black characters, using the FIX display mode.
Ultimately, I decided I didn't want to offer 2 builds because some
users are gonna be users™ and start asking what's the difference even if it's written everywhere, and make misleading posts, so i'd rather wait and go back to a fix in the future (even hope for collaborations, which is the point of all open source emulators), maybe also reference other emulators like MAME, FBNeo, and the libretro NeoCD core, but I haven't done that yet and won't be soon.
(as I've never played on original Neo Geo, for me the most important button - A - should be mapped to 2 - like on NES and SNES emulators, and like Wii games usually work)
Hmm, no. Open the manual, go to the button mappings section. Watch the original controller picture, and you will see the reason why I arranged it like it is. I even changed the Gamecube layout to comfortably accommodate this in a way that made sense for the foreign non-Neo Geo CD controller (specially if you ever use an adapter like the PS2 to GC, SNES to GC, etc.), and also be perfectly respectable for logical gameplay without adjustments in-game. You can already remap buttons inside most titles.
By reversing the buttons with Neo Geo A on Wiimote 2, you create doom for a our 'ingrained game logic', because you don't typically shoot with the right button (NES A), and jump with the left button (NES B), like the
Mega Man Anniversary Collection infamously does and was hated with a passion by most. The natural way we were accustomed to is to use the action/run button on the left, jump on the right (
Super Mario Bros, Ninja Gaiden, Duck Tales, etc.). The Super Nintendo immortalized it rotating it to SNES Y and SNES B, for the new diamond shaped buttons layout. Even the Wii does it with a Wiimote (
Mega Man 9, Mega Man 10, etc.)
To summarize, i'm not against button remappings and super keen on customization, but it wasn't as essential for me as getting the controllers feel just right for the first release.
I know that switching TV to 4:3 mode gives better quality, but I'm lazy and probably I'm not the only one)
I do this all the time with a button push of the TV remote.
- any chances to support IR pointer in menu, like whole Wii system (this is why I don't like RetroArch - no way to navigate using IR)?
Not interested myself as i'm not a big fan of the IR pointing (never even use it for any emulator on the Wii, I navigate really quick with the controller), but I guess someone else could.
how to solve “ipl.txt” error？
By having a valid IPL.TXT inside the game folder. Consult the manual, section "Prearing the games".
Only question I have is.. an argument for autobooting roms for ini in wiiflow?
Planned features for
Someday™. BTW, just found out an old forwarder I think you did, I'd like to edit it and add it as a second forwarder option for NeoCDRX.
Is it possible to add Neogeo support for "standards" Neogeo games?
To be able to launch all Neogeo games from ONE emu that does it all with the best sound and that can have a cool Neogeo Front channel logo (and not retroarch) with determined folder for games (easier to use for kids...Do you have kids?), that can use Gamecube controller...Maybe? ^^
Big fat heavy no on adding RAM memory-hungry games and integrate it to yet another emulator. That makes absolutely no sense for me. That would be like adding NES and Game Boy support to Snes9xRX. Sounds lazily "convenient" but not really needed. A computer is better for that if needed, where infinite amounts of RAM and storage are available.
. Well, the emulated console is fortunately very old and already at the limit, hence why it runs without any speed problems even on the Gamecube. You can't make it faster than it already is. Even the slowdowns in Metal Slug 2 are straight from the real game, on the real console.
