blastar

Block Panic DX, the NGCD is a diva and will always remain a diva.

Added 2024-12-31 23:00:08 +0000 UTC

The year 2024 has bring some surprises and challenges for me... like a new job that required more of my time than expected.

Another thing that bothered me a lot was the imperfect emulation of the NGCD in MAME. I usually trust this emulator blindly when I code & test with it and that doesn't seem to be a problem with AES & MVS but with the NGCD there seem to be some undocumented exceptions.
During the development I only did ingame tests on real hardware to check the performance of the AI but during the final tests I realised that START & SELECT buttons did not work... but only on the NGCD, AES & MVS worked correctly. Because I didn't want to remove the 4 player feature on the NGCD I had to rewrite parts of the code and test it step by step on real hardware. The ‘Neo Geo CD SD Loader by Furrtek’ makes it a bit easier but still very annoying and time consuming to find the problem.

Now everything seems to be working as expected and even though I didn't manage to release the planned XMAS version, it is now the first NeoGeo release in 2025 and it is also the first release ever of a 4 player game for the NGCD (KIZUNA was only available for AES & MVS).

Don't expect a highly polished game, everything is designed for functionality and fun! I am very happy with the status of this little project and I wouldn't want to add much more features... so I say FINAL... but I think there will be a BUGFIX for things I have missed.

What's new?
- Hiscore and options are now saved (if the hardware offers the possibility)
- 5 new backgrounds, more functional than beautiful... some even a bit psychedelic... use them at your own risk!
- some bugs and balancing issues fixed.

Fun fact:
In the names in the hiscorelist I have included some loyal supporters, do you recognise yourself?

Block_Panic_DX_250101_(NGCD).zip
- NGCD standard version, supports NeoTris, no FTC1B support in NGCD bios!