20 replies to this topic

[TheShanMan]

Most importantly, Harmony is AWESOME! I received mine today. It brought a smile to my face when I fired it right up to Arcadia Fireball. Kids and I had a great time with it tonight. It's an absolute bargain for the price. Major props, batari!

On to the questions/suggestions...

• I would say that paddle support could use some tweaking. Particularly the paging aspect of it. It's somewhat difficult to use as is. If you're open to discussing this I'd be happy to provide some thoughts/ideas for making it work better.
  
• It would be cool if there was a way to copy a game to a "designated" favorites folder (or remove a game from the favorites folder).
  
• Is there a reason that Harmony cuts off long names as soon as it does? Seems like there's plenty of space to show several more characters. I realize the left and right side are used to show what's selected, but it still seems like more characters could be allowed. Yes, I can do some better categorization of my games and then shorten the filenames, but it would be nice if that was less necessary than it is.
  
• It appears that I cannot switch between joysticks and paddles while Harmony is active. I'm guessing you don't get "notified" if the controller changes but would polling for the controller once a second when idle (when there is no input) be possible?

[accousticguitar]

On question #3 you can hold the joystick button down to see the whole name.

[batari]

TheShanMan, on Fri May 6, 2011 12:04 AM, said:

Most importantly, Harmony is AWESOME! I received mine today. It brought a smile to my face when I fired it right up to Arcadia Fireball. Kids and I had a great time with it tonight. It's an absolute bargain for the price. Major props, batari!

On to the questions/suggestions...

[*]I would say that paddle support could use some tweaking. Particularly the paging aspect of it. It's somewhat difficult to use as is. If you're open to discussing this I'd be happy to provide some thoughts/ideas for making it work better.

We are still working on the next BIOS version, so suggest away.

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[*]It would be cool if there was a way to copy a game to a "designated" favorites folder (or remove a game from the favorites folder).

The SD card driver cannot write to the card, so currently that's not possible.

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[*]Is there a reason that Harmony cuts off long names as soon as it does? Seems like there's plenty of space to show several more characters. I realize the left and right side are used to show what's selected, but it still seems like more characters could be allowed. Yes, I can do some better categorization of my games and then shorten the filenames, but it would be nice if that was less necessary than it is.

The reason the names are cut off is because of display limitations of the 2600. The driver can display 24 evenly-spaced characters, and this is near the current technical limit of 26 chars (though the latter wasn't possible due to ROM space.) And as mentioned, displaying more is a matter of holding down the fire button for a half-second.

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[*]It appears that I cannot switch between joysticks and paddles while Harmony is active. I'm guessing you don't get "notified" if the controller changes but would polling for the controller once a second when idle (when there is no input) be possible?

I believe you can sometimes switch from paddle to joystick by holding the joystick button after it's plugged in. I don't know if going the other way is possible, though, due to the way paddles are detected, and it would wreak havoc with certain kinds of controllers (such as the Sega gamepads and Gemini controllers.)

[TheShanMan]

batari, on Fri May 6, 2011 10:55 AM, said:

We are still working on the next BIOS version, so suggest away.

I have 2 ideas. The big problem I think is that it's pretty disconcerting when the paddle reaches the extremes to see the menu rapidly page the way it does. The idea I theoretically like the most is rather than having the input value map to a selection position, instead have it determine a direction and speed of selection changing. However, I'm not entirely sure that people would immediately get the concept. It would certainly work great if it was like a steering wheel which snapped back to center, but turning it on and seeing the list scrolling without touching the paddle might be weird. It's at least an idea to consider. The other idea which I theoretically like a little less but might be best from a practical standpoint is simply to focus on improving the way paging works. First, I don't think paging EVER has to happen that quickly. You certainly can't page through stuff with the joystick that fast and I doubt people are complaining about that. Second, maybe the paging speed could ramp up from a slower speed to a faster speed. I don't think the difference between slow and fast should be huge, but I think it would satisfy two goals: not disconcerting users who inadvertently overshoot when they're only trying to move to the next page, and allowing relatively quick paging for long lists. But if it comes down to only being able to implement a single speed, I think leaning of the direction of being too slow is better than being too fast.

I'd be happy to do any testing and I'd be happy to discuss this further, privately or publicly, if you'd like.

batari, on Fri May 6, 2011 10:55 AM, said:

I believe you can sometimes switch from paddle to joystick by holding the joystick button after it's plugged in. I don't know if going the other way is possible, though, due to the way paddles are detected, and it would wreak havoc with certain kinds of controllers (such as the Sega gamepads and Gemini controllers.)

Given that pressing the button to activate the controller isn't terribly intuitive, is polling something that could be done? It's not clear to me if you're saying polling would wreak havoc or trying to make joystick to paddle switching work would. Good to know about the button though.

[batari]

I'll open up a discussion with the Harmony team about the first item.

As for detection, joysticks are completely passive devices, and there is no way to tell the difference between a joystick and nothing in the controller port at all. We can detect paddles, though, and do so by detecting the pot (which will discharge a cap within a couple of frames) while regular joysticks will not. So basically, if it's not a paddle (or driving controller, which is possible to detect) it's a joystick.

The problem with Sega controllers is they were of course not made for 2600s and they have an internal connection that is impossible to tell from a paddle pot. Gemini controllers actually have a paddle (and theoretically could work as either, I think). So a joystick button press is required so these don't make the menu go all wonky.

[TheShanMan]

Well even if none of the of the things that slightly bug me can/will be fixed, Harmony is still awesome and I'm thoroughly satisfied. I just don't want raising these issues to be confused with dissatisfaction at all!

[Thomas Jentzsch]

TheShanMan, on Fri May 6, 2011 8:37 PM, said:

First, I don't think paging EVER has to happen that quickly. You certainly can't page through stuff with the joystick that fast and I doubt people are complaining about that.

You can! Just move the joystick left or right. The paging speed should be identical for paddles and joystick.

But we could easily make is slower if more people complain about it.

[TheShanMan]

Well like I said ideally the paging speed would ramp up from "slow" to "full speed" over the course of several seconds so it would improve the "first time experience" and help prevent overshooting, and still be fast for someone with a big list who is going for a particular game instead of just browsing. Just my opinion but that seems like a no brainer solution to me. Kinda like how fast forward/reverse work on my Zune. But if you guys want more feedback maybe I should start a new thread specifically about this to draw attention to the idea.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

TheShanMan, on Tue May 10, 2011 7:21 AM, said:

Well like I said ideally the paging speed would ramp up from "slow" to "full speed" over the course of several seconds so it would improve the "first time experience" and help prevent overshooting, and still be fast for someone with a big list who is going for a particular game instead of just browsing. Just my opinion but that seems like a no brainer solution to me. Kinda like how fast forward/reverse work on my Zune. But if you guys want more feedback maybe I should start a new thread specifically about this to draw attention to the idea.

Not necessary. I got your idea, it is common practice in many applications/devices and definitely improves the interface. But for implementation we would need some RAM which is really, really scare. Therefore I am not sure if and how good it can be implemented here.

One simple idea would be, to reduce the paging delay by a fraction of the current delay for each page. E.g. if the initial delay would be 100 frames and it would be reduced by 1/8th, the delay values would be:
100, 88, 77, 68, 60, 53, 47, 42, 37, 33, 29, 26, 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 8, 8...

The same with a reduction of 1/4th would result into:
100, 75, 57, 43, 33, 25, 19, 15, 12, 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 4, 4...

So we had to play with the initial values and the reduction factor to find an optimal response curve. And maybe the minimum delay should be limited also. Would something like this be OK for you? And shouldn't that also work for the up and down cursor movement?

[TheShanMan]

Gotcha. I forget that memory was so limited! Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but what you're proposing seems to be exactly what I'm asking for. Paging starts off slow, and gradually gets fast. If that's the case, then by all means it sounds great.

By up/down cursor movement are you talking about applying this to joystick up/down? If so, that seems very reasonable to me as well.

If you guys decide this is worth trying, I would be more than happy to test any prerelease versions.

Thanks!

[TheShanMan]

Bump. Last night I was using the paddles with the harmony menus and once again I was very frustrated by the paging system, but even more importantly it seems that the first item on the page can not be opened (whether a game or a subdirectory). The button is totally ignored.

Any progress on the new firmware? Is there a prerelease version I can test maybe?

[Official Ninja]

Tonight I tried using my Harmony cart with my Coleco Gemini and Gemini controller. If I had the controller plugged in when I powered on the system I think the Harmony cart was using it as a paddle. I was plugging the controller in after power up and it worked as a joystick.

Question I have is, am I reading the above correct? If I hold the button for a coule seconds the Harmony cart will switch and use the controller as a joystick so I don't need to plug it in after powering on?

Thanks! Harmony is fantastic. My only complaint is that the text is hard to read on a large LCD display. I'm sure that cant be much helped given the limits of the VCS hardware.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

IIRC you have to press a button while powering up the console.

[Official Ninja]

Thomas Jentzsch, on Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:26 PM, said:

IIRC you have to press a button while powering up the console.

Forgot to thank you for this. Your right. Hold the button while powering on. Works great.

Thanks.

[kixs]

How many write cycles are possible on the ARM flash memory?

As I understand game rom file is written from SD to internal flash memory every time a game is run. And it's not like with the SSD's where you have lots of memory cells and space. ARM has only 32KB of flash memory that is completely overwritten almost every time.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

kixs, on Tue Feb 28, 2012 3:15 PM, said:

How many write cycles are possible on the ARM flash memory?

IIRC100k

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As I understand game rom file is written from SD to internal flash memory every time a game is run. And it's not like with the SSD's where you have lots of memory cells and space. ARM has only 32KB of flash memory that is completely overwritten almost every time.

How do you know?

[kixs]

How? Its only logical. But I can be wrong of curse.

100K seems to be high enough.

[batari]

kixs, on Tue Feb 28, 2012 3:15 PM, said:

How many write cycles are possible on the ARM flash memory?

As I understand game rom file is written from SD to internal flash memory every time a game is run. And it's not like with the SSD's where you have lots of memory cells and space. ARM has only 32KB of flash memory that is completely overwritten almost every time.

It's not overwritten every time - most games are less than 32k and we do implement a form of load leveling.

100k is correct, and it's a "guaranteed minimum" so really, the actual limit is likely more. I think I calculated once that users are very unlikely to ever exceed the limit, even if used daily for many years.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

batari, on Tue Feb 28, 2012 4:30 PM, said:

we do implement a form of load leveling.

Can you share some details?

[kixs]

batari:
I've checked the tech data of the ARM used and it is specified as 100K write/erase cycles.

I'm about to order one unit and just had to make sure

[Thomas Jentzsch]

kixs, on Tue Feb 28, 2012 4:53 PM, said:

I'm about to order one unit and just had to make sure

I think you can be sure. And even a simple load leveling, like using a random start block, will increase that up to 400k (assuming 8K games on average).