MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi all

Is it normal to see a garbled frame of the previous game flash up between loading roms using the neo geo core?

So for example if I load kof98 then switch the rom via the menu (using F12) to say metal slug I'll see a garbled frame for kof before metal slug loads. I get this using both darksoft and .neo romsets

Is it something I have misconfigured or is this normal?

I am asking this as I hate seeing the garbled screen

Many thanks

Ant

Anyone?

Since the Neo Geo core uses SDRAM, it's not automatically cleared/wiped of the previous data it may contain so you see the "artifacts" of what is still in it's memory.
The only way to get around it, is to reboot the Mister (Physically or via OSD->Reboot) to get back into the Main menu, which clears the SDRAM while it is up.
There are other cores that experience the same thing.

I've used this core a lot but never observed this thing until your post. Now checked it out again and yeah, it's there, but it's literally blink-and-you'll-miss-it and only happens on some games.

If it really bothers you, try to imagine you're in a MiSTer arcade. In a real one, games would often display some garbage on startup too

Ah yes I thought it was something to do with ram, and things still being in sdram when switching roms. I guess it makes it faster to load the next rom, I wonder if the devs would consider adding an option, like (fast load toggle or something) where if one did not want to see the garbled screen (artifacts) between loads we could clear the ram of graphics data from the previous game (maybe while blanking the screen) to prevent this effect. Heck maybe I'll do some work and submit a PR for it. Many thanks for the replies guys ace info from you guys.