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[Reaperman93010]

I posted this deep in a topic a bit ago, and I figure it's deserving of its own topic to add to.  What reasonable updates can you think of for supercard?  Not the natural desire for instant total compatability, but more reasonable touches.

Here are my thoughts:
Increasing disk size limit, or allowing multiple partitions
allow directory sorting (new files currently drop to the bottom)
Improved movie/audio compression
a blank savegame creator or renamer utility
move emus out of firmware and onto card folders (allows easy emu upgrade)
allow it to be skinnable from skins stored on flash
allow association of helper apps on the card with specific file extensions
(as long as we used standard pogoshell helper apps we could expand our list of supported filetypes considerably)

[Koji]

I posted this deep in a topic a bit ago, and I figure it's deserving of its own topic to add to.  What reasonable updates can you think of for supercard?  Not the natural desire for instant total compatability, but more reasonable touches.

Here are my thoughts:
Increasing disk size limit, or allowing multiple partitions
allow directory sorting (new files currently drop to the bottom)
Improved movie/audio compression
a blank savegame creator or renamer utility
move emus out of firmware and onto card folders (allows easy emu upgrade)
allow it to be skinnable from skins stored on flash
allow association of helper apps on the card with specific file extensions
(as long as we used standard pogoshell helper apps we could expand our list of supported filetypes considerably)

Your first 2 are limitations of FAT16. There won't be a way to increase the disk size but partitions should be possible.
Directory sorting you can do through a third party FAT organization program.
Romman doesn't make the program that plays/encodes media.
Blank save creator doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it wouldn't be hard to make
Moving emus out of the firmware would be a good idea, as long as romman could find a way so that roms could still be associated with them (which is what you said next)

Fat32 support would be nice (and would cover your first 2) but I'm not sure how feasible that'd be.
I'd also like to see the entire GUI overhauled and customizable like moonshell, or better yet be able to autoload moonshell on SC startup (if you could get it to load NDS games from it's menu)

reaperman: Also I wanted to note I wasn't trying to attack your suggestions, just saying what exactly causes those problems and why they may not be changed.

[gingi]

Directory sorting you can do through a third party FAT organization program.

Do you know any simple program like that?

thanks

[kdanarch]

That's funny, because I kinda have my own demands for the next firmware upgrade

Like, for instance, the GBA support.  Romman is doing some wonderful things with the NDS library, but the GBA library still suffers from periodic slowdowns and incompatibilities (Dawn of Sorrow works great except for the intro movie which can be lived without, but why is it it can handle more sprites than Aria of Sorrow?)

And an updated patcher to support a wide array of nonstandard roms (like NDS homebrew that save to SRAM, instead of EEPROM).

But I guess most of my demands are rather nitpicky

I was actually quite ecstatic when I mastered the QPC method

[sWampy]

I'd be happy as all get out if the convert program would take command line options so other frontends could be made to manage roms/saves.   If for some reason they won't do that, I'd like it to have an option to trim the roms.  

If possible, on the fly patching would rock where if you launched a game with the a button it would run like the rom was set to run when created, b runs from cf, x runs from sc or something along those lines.

I would like the supercard bios to have a signature that causes the ds to always boot into ds mode if it has been flashed with flashme, but I guess that might cause a problem if there is a reason to not have it in ds mode.

[eumel45]

allow directory sorting (new files currently drop to the bottom)

Yep, that would be nice, it would also be nice if the '64 games per folder limit' would be fixed. For the sorting one can use Fatsort as a workaround, which can change the order of the files in the filesystem directly.

Improved movie/audio compression

ACK, I found especially the movie compression to be pretty useless, since its extremly slow (encoding like 5mins of Video took almost an hour). For audio I currently use Moonshell for DS, which can decode Mp3 directly, so no conversion needed.

move emus out of firmware and onto card folders (allows easy emu upgrade)

Recently there was code floating around for reading directly from SD-Card so that should be easily possible, just need to get the maintainers from the emulators to incooperate the direct-sd/flashcard reading code.

While I don't think the GBA and DS slowdowns are completly solvable on Supercard due to slow RAM and not enough RAM for larger ROMs, at least on the GBA side the patching could be improved, currently it freezes in a lot of games and it isn't automatic either.

[sWampy]

I'd be happy as all get out if the convert program would take command line options so other frontends could be made to manage roms/saves.   If for some reason they won't do that, I'd like it to have an option to trim the roms.  

If possible, on the fly patching would rock where if you launched a game with the a button it would run like the rom was set to run when created, b runs from cf, x runs from sc or something along those lines.

I would like the supercard bios to have a signature that causes the ds to always boot into ds mode if it has been flashed with flashme, but I guess that might cause a problem if there is a reason to not have it in ds mode.

[honglong]

how about having direct access for GBA games from the CF / SD card? That way GBA games will load in about a second, just like the DS ones do.

[albrowne]

I think the DS side of the SuperCard is fun at the moment, but the GBA side needs work.

Load off SuperCard to make it load instantly.

Eliminate or at least reduce slowdown.

[Koji]

How many times have you guys been told in various threads that there probably isn't a way to reduce the slowdown in GBA and that it is impossible for GBA games to run directly off of the SD/CF cards?

The limiting factor for speed in GBA games is the fact that the hardware just isn't fast enough. No matter what you do in software, if the hardware can't do it... it just simply can't do it.

The gba has 256k of ram, which is practically nothing... it's just enough to manage. To make up for this the GBA has incredibly fast streaming. Every GBA game is constantly streaming data directly from the GBA cart to the GBA. If the data isn't fed fast enough, the GBA won't get the data when it requires it and it will crash.

The DS runs differently. With 4 megs of ram, it doesn't need to constantly stream data off the DS carts. This has 2 major benefits.

#1: It means that nintendo can use smaller and cheaper carts then in GBA because data doesn't need to be constantly streamed to it.

#2: It uses less power then the GBA because it's not constantly pulling data off the card.

There is also an unexpected benefit for us. Since most DS games DON'T stream directly from the DS carts, this allows us to load directly from SD/CF cards even though they are slower then DS carts. Since the DS is designed to load things instead of stream, it doesn't usually mind that the CF/SD cards are slower. There are exceptions to this... games with lots of voice samples that are constantly being streamed (ultimate spider man) or other bits of data can cause slowdowns up the whazzoo or even cause crashes.

So, would it be completely impossible to load GBA directly off of SD/CF? No... however, it would be impossible to get a PLAYABLE experience out of it. To let GBA games load off of SD/CF you'd have to do one of two things. Either slow the entire game down DRASTICALLY so that you could stream data to the game fast enough so it wouldn't crash... or you could try to play the GBA game normally and never be able to play any games as they'd all crash as soon as you turn them on.

[davhuit]

Except for new nds game fixed, I don't have others requests, I'm happy right now with the actual firmware. (For the GBA, I have a FA256 so don't really use my SD for GBA games).

[amrod]

for kirby to work !

[pg65]

PDA,   note pad and phone book.

[albrowne]

for kirby to work !

Seconded!

[brianka]

I was wondering if it would be possible to have a software-based time clock that could be set to the correct time and day at start-up, and then accessed by games such as Pokemon R/S/E to allow the time-based events to work?

I wouldn't mind taking the moment or two to set this every time if it would let me gather berries and take advantage of special sales in the game.

Just a thought.  :idea: