Modifying the loader

[erico]

...

I´m thinking about it, we already have an intro image, maybe call coders to have an icon for such?

What do you mean by this?

First, yeah your arguments stand.
About the sentence above, I thought maybe each one coding a game could also produce an icon for your system, apart from the intro picture.

Here is a mock of an icons only interface, pretty badly done as I got a bunch of stuff together really quick.
Maybe icons only won´t work, too little space.

mock.png (3.97 KiB) Viewed 4779 times

[Jerom]

First, these icons are quite decent considering the 15*15px size...
Maybe adding a tiny header could help to describe better each game?

loa2.png (1.72 KiB) Viewed 4773 times

[Sorunome]

...

I´m thinking about it, we already have an intro image, maybe call coders to have an icon for such?

What do you mean by this?

First, yeah your arguments stand.
About the sentence above, I thought maybe each one coding a game could also produce an icon for your system, apart from the intro picture.
[...]

It already allows you to, via the tool i wrote here: http://www.sorunome.de/makeGamebuinoICO

First, these icons are quite decent considering the 15*15px size...
Maybe adding a tiny header could help to describe better each game?

loa2.png

This is actually looking quite nice! Maybe though make them a bit less tall so that the bar can always be on the bottom? So something like 15*13 icons?

[erico]

Hey Jerom, nice idea with the header!

Also, the selector could be grey, just a square.
We could use 15x13 slots, but I´d prefer that when going for the half-cut icon line, the list just scrolls up a line.
Still, this was just a quick idea, there is sure to be a better way designing such interface.

A quick thought brings up the usual side-pan interface (similar to netflix) that could also work here, the icons would be bigger and there would be less games on screen.

And yeah, I too think it is looking good.

[Sorunome]

[...]

Also, the selector could be grey, just a square.

I thought about inverting?

We could use 15x13 slots, but I´d prefer that when going for the half-cut icon line, the list just scrolls up a line.
Still, this was just a quick idea, there is sure to be a better way designing such interface.

It's more impracticable with speed as SD card access isn't the quickest, I already had to do some dirty hacks to get pages working

A quick thought brings up the usual side-pan interface (similar to netflix) that could also work here, the icons would be bigger and there would be less games on screen.

And yeah, I too think it is looking good.

Besides of the name we don't really have anything to display, and as the name is 8 chars at max, so 32px it'll actually better to have it on the bottom.

Also, in theory the SD card slowdown isn't too high if you add more programs on a page, because the big slowdown is when swapping page due to cycling through all the files. Currently it isn't even half a second, i think, which makes it pretty ok. So I'd actually prefer to stick with pages, programming-wise.

[Jerom]

Also, I don't know how you show which game is selected... a "invert" square on the selected game is the easiest solution, but I think something like that could be great:

load-anim1.gif (2.79 KiB) Viewed 4759 times

load-anim2.gif (2.85 KiB) Viewed 4759 times

[Sorunome]

There again the issue arrizes that some information is "lost", as the white pixels just overwrite the icon no matter what.
With invert i mean inverting the icon currently selected (all black becoming white and all white becoming black).

Also, 15*13pxl thumbnails it is?

EDIT: the thing with your solutions is that I'd need a second screen buffer, meaning 504 bytes of free RAM.
The Loader currently uses 1649 free RAM leaving only 399 bytes for dynamic variables, and thus not enough for another screen buffer.

EDIT2: So, to sum up, I'd do now 15*13 thumbnails in a 5*3 grid, oriented in thumbnails.

EDIT3: I just got the idea where i remove the ICO files and make, like INF (info) files that have like a longer name stored, the icon, and potentially other stuff.

[erico]

Jerom´s cursors are better visual wise.
I´m not sure invert would work as it would make the selected icon hard to read.

If we can´t override anything on the icons, then we need space for the selector.
Here a 15x13 icon won´t leave proper space for the lower bar as was proposed(because of 1 pixel line )

We could do 15x12 icons instead. But then things start to get too small.
Maybe working with 2 lines of bigger icons would be better (4*2).

Here is a mock on the 15x13 and a blinking square selector.

mock.gif (1.72 KiB) Viewed 4754 times

[erico]

Here a 4x2 grid example...

mock3.gif (3.51 KiB) Viewed 4752 times

[Sorunome]

So the second one is 19*19 ? i'm hesistent in going above 16 due to two-bytes but it'll probably work fine, yet i still enjoy the 15*13 one more.
Thoughts from you guys?