The default font for the games menu on the Everdrive MD is a little too wide. Many game names (even after trimming off details such as publisher, region, .bin and so on) are still too long to be displayed in their entireity in the games menu.
Is there any way to change the menu so that a smaller or thinner font is used? (manually renaming every game to a 26 character limit isn't as fun as it may at first sound :P)
Last edited by dragonstrap; 04-28-2011 at 12:46 PM. Reason: re-wording, elaborating
it is not a big font, it is low resolution, font size 8x8 like sega tile size
Maybe if you could scroll over a few places that might help but I would think renaming files to shorter names is easier. If you're just dumping every single game on your SD card then you are doing yourself a disservice anyway since some games just suck and take up room on your menu. There are some games you will never want to play.
I concur. There's some guy in the other thread worrying about the 2GB limit on an SMS Everdrive... even if you had the full ROM set and every TecToy/pirate variation I'm sure it'd be less than that, but even if it wasn't, what would you do with that many ROMs? Does anyone really download a full GoodGen set and throw the half dozen of each and every ROM onto SD? Seems crazy to me. I'd much rather have a small selection of games/hacks I'm actually interested in playing.Originally Posted by MottZilla
I don't have every game on there, and I've already removed all the TOSEC details and extension from the ROMs, but even still.. 26 characters means that the actual game titles need to be changed often cutting out bits of the title or merging words etc.
For some games, abbreviating isn't a problem
"<--AVAILABLE CHARACTERS-->"
"Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic The Hedgehog 3", renamed to:
"Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 3"
But some titles don't abbreviate so easily:
"<--AVAILABLE CHARACTERS-->"
"Wonder boy III - The Dragon's Trap"
"Donald Duck in Maui Mallard"
"Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine"
"ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron"
"Wonder Boy in Monster World"
"World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck"
If a thin font was used, such as 6*8 (or 6*6 if that is easier), this would give roughly 10 extra characters.. I think this would be a nice touch to have this as an option in the menu section and this would allow enough space for a LOT of titles that currently would require renaming.
Would having a font that is thinner than a tile be a lot of work? I imagine it might be, having to split up the characters and recombining them later(?) though I've never worked on SMS so I really have no idea.
Super Everdrive and MD Everdrive could both benefit from smaller/thinner fonts, if that was possible.
That's not really what I'm saying though. I just think it would be beneficial to be able to have enough character space to allow for full names without having to manually truncate them. HORIZONTAL space is what I'm taking about here.
A regular expression renaming can quickly remove all the (E) (!) .bin and all that other stuff, but manually renaming ROMs takes a while and there's usually some unavoidable loss of information involved.
But while it's been brought up - Having removed duplicates, 2GB is actually enough for every MD and SMS ROM, so why not have them? I have my main "MEGADRIVE" folder, which is filled with all my favourite games. Within that I also have a folder for "HACKS" and a folder for "ARCHIVE". Having an archive of every game is great; the other day I played with a friend and he remembered some game I'd never heard of (Rocket Knight Adventures) and we just went to the archive and played it. It's now moved its way into my favourites ;D
Last edited by dragonstrap; 04-28-2011 at 07:55 PM. Reason: typographical error(s)
I have every USA rom on my Everdrive-MD and Master Everdrive. But that's because I am a game hoarder. I know there is a lot of crap to weed through but I like having them all on one cart. I don't do the pirate roms though or the dupes. And then I put a few EUR roms on that didn't reach the states. But with all of that I still didn't manage to go much over 1 gig, so I have no idea why the 2gig limit would be an issue. :shrug:
I assume the font is fixed width, would be nice if everdrive knew a title was too long to fully display and scrolled the title when highlighted
Sonic 2 uses higher resolution than other games. Is it possible to use this resolution with everdrive?
That would be nice. This approach would also probably be easier than having a thinner font than tile size. Shouldn't need much more than a timer and some basic string manipulation.
Last edited by dragonstrap; 05-01-2011 at 02:53 PM.
yeah I mean, if the font is infact fixed width then you could just go off the length of the string (im not 100% sure that it is)
It would be great if the text could scroll on long file names. I'm wondering how hard it would be to implement it on a OS update?
...console emulation has no soul...
I personally shorten long files to fit screen (mostly) and removed extensions (software in card does not rely on extension) so I don't need such update but:
In SNES there is possible to use doubled resolution 512x448 or 512x224.
In SMD there possibility to use 320x448, maybe even 640x448.
I think changing resolution would be simpler (added in OS as option).
Krikzz seemed to have used the same type of font even in his N64 prototype, so it might just be what he's chosen to use so far. For systems that can do better, I'd definitely love to have a better font. Would that automatically mean more characters displayed, I don't know? But the one he uses for SNES and Genesis I'm not a fan of.
"Wonder boy III "
"Donald Duck in Maui"
"Mean Bean Machine"
"ToeJam & Earl 2"
"Wonder Boy"
"World of Illusion"
Fixed. Quit being so anal...does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? You can recognise the games and they will still play EXACTLY the same which is the whole point of the Everdrive, your Mega Drive, your eyes and your thumbs.
It's a suggestion for improvement; I'm not suggesting that it's of any major priority but it would clearly be an improvement on an already incredible ROM cartridge. You are missing the point of a feature suggestion.
Due to the small size of ROMs, a LOT of people will keep every ROM (every clean dump without region duplicates anyway) for Master System, Mega Drive, and maybe 32X as well on their card. A lot of people that I know keep every ROM on their card as an achive of all games, with their favourites in a shorter, more navigable directory.
As I mentioned before, it's easy enough to grep filenames to remove the extensions, the region and dump information etc. to make some games fit. But many other games will not. The task of counting exactly 26 characters and renaming each ROM not only introduces a lack of consistency in naming, but is also an extremely time consuming process to repeat.
Either solution of having either:
1) a thinner font to allow for longer file names, or
2) a scrolling function, so that after <some amount of time>, the ROM
name scrolls along
In hindsight, I am now in favour of a scrolling function as this would be a very useful (and more easily achieved) feature that all versions of everdrive could benefit from.
Another 2 options that I would consider useful (though likely impractical due to menu slow-down) would be:
1) automatically supress extensions in game listings
2) the ability to supress TOSEC naming convention tags in game listings
If these were implemented, there would be no need for any ROM preparation at all beyond deciding which ROMs to include.
Last edited by dragonstrap; 05-04-2011 at 03:34 AM.
Having the selected game title scroll would work. Making a thinner "font" wouldn't really be practical because you have to understand that the font is based on the background which uses 8x8 pixel tiles. Genesis has 32 and 40 tile width resolutions. It sounds like maybe EverDrive's file listing menu is using the 256x224 resolution rather than the 320x224? The only way to have a thinner "font" would need to in software draw to the screen in a different method.
I realised that, also the scrolling approach is better because it would be applicable to any Everdrive, regardless of console or resolution.
I've made a thread to discuss more generic improvement ideas which could apply to ALL Everdrive carts here:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=494518
Last edited by dragonstrap; 05-04-2011 at 03:36 AM.
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