Sugestion for next release with all card compatibility

[Metal_Spirit]

Agentq... I do not know what you are thinking to do for the next release of scumm. This is your choice and your choice alone, and if you decide to drop support for some cards, then we should all accept without complaints, although, off course, I think that would be sad for the DS Homebrew scene.

So here is my sugestion:

As I stated before a menu should be the solution (or at least it seems so). In this way, only one driver, the one for the card in use, would be required to be initialized, and as such there would be no problems with drivers superimposing, and drivers initializing first than others.

But you seemed reluctant about a menu, so here is another ideia that i expect should remove all your doubts.

I cannot talk about other cards, since i really do not know how they work, but one thing is for shure, all cards have the possibility to save games as the M3.

So... what if you saved the choice made in the menu to the save file that every card should create and cand easily access? In this way the menu would only need to appear once. All that would be required was that scumm retrieved that data from the save file before initializing, and only running the menu if nothing was found. Of course that would require the use of the Game Manager or similar (if it exists) to create the save files.

Also another sugestion. What about the possibility of shutting down the upper screen? I really don´t know how much processing power is required to mantain the upper screen working, but that power could be used, as an option, to process SO3 files. In this way people with low card space could use digital sounds without slowdowns. Is this worth it?

I really hope you do this, since I´m hopping you keep support on the M3.

PS: Hope i´m not repeating anything already told here, but i really do not read all the posts.

[agentq]

So... what if you saved the choice made in the menu to the save file that every card should create and cand easily access?

Does such a thing exist? Because if it did, do you not think I would be using it already?

See this thread for my current plans for card drivers:
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=2613

Also another sugestion. What about the possibility of shutting down the upper screen? I really don´t know how much processing power is required to mantain the upper screen working, but that power could be used, as an option, to process SO3 files. In this way people with low card space could use digital sounds without slowdowns. Is this worth it?

No, the upper screen uses very little CPU power.

One option I have is to try to drop support for MP3 and replace it with FLAC. The CPU power required for this is supposedly lower, although the compression ratio isn't quite as high.

[Metal_Spirit]

So... what if you saved the choice made in the menu to the save file that every card should create and cand easily access?

Does such a thing exist? Because if it did, do you not think I would be using it already?

Doesn´t it exist??
What are the .dat files that the M3 card create in the NDSSAVE dir?
Aren't they saves from the games. When I install Scumm with the Game Manager after every boot I the M3 wants to save stuff in the scumm.dat file. And when I boot a game it accesses that same file to read saved data.
And for this no card initialization is required...

Please correct me if I´m wrong...

PS: Ops... Apparently you already got this idea (but off course you should had )... It´s on the last post on the thread you just linked me to in the previous message.
Sorry about that!

[agentq]

The GBAMP and Max Media Dock don't have SRAM saves, so that method can't be relied upon, no. Neither do DS slot devices like NinjaDS.