Whomever picks up mor RAM, drop me your email address if you have a paypal account and we will cover it!

Yo Bill,
Not certain if you saw my message as the ITG3 theme discussion has been heated, but the DMV3 at ACME was set to $1.00 for 3 songs (bonus still 3 songs) when I was there on Wednesday.  Do you intend to set it back to $0.75 for 4 songs (bonus=3)?  Also, the monitor on the DMV3 is losing coloration on left side.

Anyhow if you already addressed this please disregard, it is possible I missed your response as well.
-Chris

Hey Chris,
I will note this, and make changes when I get back up that way.  But might be  a week until I get by there again.  thx for the heads up.  Hope the monitor is not going out!

The DM monitor looks more like it could use a good degaussing than anything - one side's going pink, which has the side effect of making it really hard to see details.

Chromatic and ITG2 Ultimate are now installed on the machine.  We've switched over to Chromatic, which, so far, is a very nice theme with absolutely no lag on the song wheel and better automatic handling of custom speed mods (it sorts the official, hacked, and custom ones automatically and doesn't round to the nearest 0.1x).  Also, Chromatic supports rate modifiers, so 1.1 - 2.0x music speed is now available to everyone.

There's one slight issue with Chromatic that I'm going to tweak - the step judgments do not flash, so a long run of fantastics has almost no onscreen indicator that you're hitting notes.  In the next couple days I'll modify the theme to have a very slight flash and then load the change onto the machine as soon as I can.

After playing 1 set on the Chromatic theme, I wouldn't mind keeping it the way it is. I was actually doing better when step judgments don't flash - I have more concentration and less likely to get a seizure looking at the flashing Fantastics/Excellents because that's where I mainly look. I got 5 excellents on Koko Soko and was blue comboing it half-way through the song.

Anyways, this is my input on things, and I guess it doesn't matter to me if this changes or not. I absolutely love this theme!!! 

Keep in mind that the Chromatic theme probably fixed the timing windows as well. I haven't looked at the theme metrics, but I believe it's one of the ones that has the correct windows.

You might be right about that... I did have my suspicions to why the timing was so much easier. While I was playing Koko Soko, I kept thinking to myself "I should be getting excellents right about now" and I never did until I really got off beat lol. Nevertheless, if that's the case, I'm fine with it.

can't wait to check it out.

What kind of ram does it use? DDR1/2/3? or even SD/RD? how much are we planning to add? and if available, do we know what kind of motherboard is in it? (to gauge how much ram can be added and what kind)

Mmm timing windows fixed? Maybe get a few more quads finally? I'm pretty neutral toward the flashing timing but Chromatic overall looks pimp! Thanks Tony!

Most themes I've looked at have the disputedly "correct" (I can't really comment on it, since I'm not that familiar with the debate) Preferences-cabinet:JudgeWindowAdd=0.0015 (since theme makers usually just copy metrics.ini from OpenITG's default theme as a template), the issue is that the theme itself doesn't always push it's preferences into Stepmania.ini (Details, part 2 below).  I was at Acme yesterday playing around with somethings yesterday (Details below).  I've bumped us back to JudgeWindowAdd=0.0000 to maintain backwards consistency in the mean time, but am glad to set it as 0.0015 if it's what people feel is appropriate - I'll be down there again tonight and can take care of it easily.

(Details, part 1) I added a very, very subtle flash - with no image stretching (ITG3 used a stronger flash AND significant stretching) - to Chromatic, it should hopefully strike a balance between Tuan's stated preference for a non-distracting indicator and some people's preference for something.  The flash stops being noticeable during fast runs, with the indicator remaining a somewhat constant lighter tone, as the judgment for a step is replaced by the next too quickly to notice.  In my opinion, if you're not looking for it and/or playing high speed charts, you really won't notice, it's really, really subtle.

(Details, part 2) I learned a lot more about the boot sequence, theme metrics, and the main settings files (Stepmania.ini, GamePrefs.ini, etc) while fumbling with the machine yesterday.  Certain startup cases (killing and manually re-launching OpenITG is the most consistent way) with cause OpenITG to override Stepmania.ini with the default machine settings from the theme's metrics.ini.  This has, most commonly, changed the settings for Long/Marathon cutoffs and USB songs (in some themes the default maximum is set to 20 songs, rather than 50).  Yesterday, this caused some seriously scary issues as OpenITG's default theme (and therefore all derived themes) Preferences-cabinet:InputDrivers=none, which happens to make the machine unable to recognize the pads, buttons, and coin mechs, thereby rendering the machine useless.  I've fixed this in Chromatic, and I believe I threw the fix into Static.ini; if not, I will do so next time I'm there, as Static.ini should override any theme's attempts to set it to none.  Themes never push the Preferences-cabinet settings onto the machine during a theme switch, and usually not during a hard reboot (i.e. flipping the power switch), but will usually do so when I do cleaner shutdowns via SSH (I don't have the details down perfectly yet, the system's kind of complicated).

(Details, part 3) sfxazure was having some issues getting all of his USB songs to show up, which may have been related to Stepmania.ini overwrites from Details, part 2.  If anyone else is having only 20 songs show up on their card, let me know, so I can try to fix it.  I added the 50 song limit to Static.ini, which should resolve it completely, but I didn't have a chance to confirm.

EDIT: Swapping 0.0020 with 0.0015 in this post, since .0020 is the PS2 JudgeWindowAdd setting, not the arcade one (which is 0.0015).

Did you check the custom songs loading timeout option? If it's set too low, it will only load whatever songs it could grab before the timer expires. Note: Setting it to unlimited is a farce, as it can still go into the music wheel and only load a certain number of songs off of USB. On my machine, I've simply made it a practice to keep the number of songs on a USB stick below 25. This way, the machine has time to read P1 and P2's profile before the time limit is reached.

It's set to 10 seconds, which is where it's been every time I've checked.  The main things that stick out to me are:
1. While we set it to 50, the machine did reset itself to 20 the other day (which I then set back to 50, but it may have gone back to 20 with the other theme-induced changes).
2. The drive in question consistently showed 20 songs, even as he moved files on / off the drive.  It could just be coincidental, but that sort of consistency on a number that has been directly relevant in the past is worth noting.

Oh yeah, Tony and I will be at ACME again tonight, along with TADA, who is back after over a year in Japan!   Come say hi!

Regarding JudgeWindowAdd, I finally did a little searching of my own, and, after parsing through a lot of very angry posts on a few forums, I agree with swapping back to 0.0015.  Unless somebody speaks out against doing so (with a good reason), I'm throwing it on 0.0015 again when I get there tonight.

It's easy to push the setting to whatever, so we can always "fix" it again later, though, as far as I know, the only way to remove scores from wider window settings is to just delete everything... so, yeah, hopefully everyone's fine with 0.0015.

@NIMM: Kevin would know for sure, but when I skimmed for details, it seems that older dedicabs run DDR PC-2700.  Buying RAM is currently backburnered, though, as Kevin's information regarding how much RAM (one 1GB stick and one or two - I've managed to forget since yesterday - 512MB sticks) is physically present does not match the machines information, so I need to find some time to peel the machine off the wall and open up the computer to confirm Kevin's information (if correct, then, most likely, a stick is improperly seated - I'd just need to re-seat it and we're good to go).

So, 0 is OpenITG and .0015 is original ITG2?

A little more complicated than that - this is the most concise, non-judgmental summary I can come up with (there may be slight inaccuracies, but it's close enough):

- ITG2 Dedicabs had explicit 0.0015 until r16, where they commented it out.  It was meant to compensate for the slower I/O polling rate of the Andamiro I/O system (PIUIO) vs. other OTG2 setups they were working with.  There's a comment in metrics.ini to substantiate this.

- ITG2 r16 fixed the slow polling rate of PIUIO, so Roxor felt it appropriate to remove the 0.0015.  They commented the 0.0015 out of metrics.ini and added a 2nd comment saying the bug was fixed.  Unfortunately, ITG copies metrics.ini settings to the machine's main files after a major change, so removing the 0.0015 setting does not change the machine's settings - it will only change if a theme explicitly overrides it.  Supposedly, later patches took out the line entirely, which still does nothing to change it.  No patch was found that tried to explicitly set it to 0.  The global offset was tweaked a little as well for reasons unknown.

- OpenITG originally set it to 0, since that was determined to be "proper".  OpenITG beta 3 sets it to 0.0015, since that was determined to be "appropriate", regardless of whether it is "proper" or not.  More on this later.

- Many themes (Chromatic and Ultimate included) are made by copying a rip of ITG2 r2's default theme, rather than using a fallback setting, so they persist the explicit 0.0015 from early revisions.

- It's been theorized that Roxor meant to set it to 0 for r16, but they messed up and though it would be set to 0 implicitly if they commented it out; personally, this theory is probably right.  Many tried to enforce setting OpenITG to 0 as "proper" based on this theory and made a big deal of r2-based themes ruining your OpenITG settings and invalidating that machine's scores.  Said group was mainly pre-r16 players who felt it devalued their accomplishments to be compared to newer players with their looser timing windows.

- The counterargument is r16-r23, which are objectively official (that is, Roxor - the singular authority on this subject - released them as official) and were the final set of official revisions, even if leaving the 0.0015 was an accident on Roxor's part.  Basically, if OpenITG with 0.0015 is invalidated, even if the cause was a faulty theme tweaking it, then what happens to unhacked machines which necessarily have 0.0015 and cannot be changed to 0?

Everyone seemed to accept that an unhacked machine is necessarily valid (it's official per Roxor, even if it wasn't "correct"), and OpenITG, being as close as possible to ITG2, must therefore be indistinguishable from ITG2 if both have the same timing windows.  So OpenITG with 0.0015 must be just as valid as an unhacked r16-r23 cabinet, so OpenITG with 0.0015 is necessarily valid.

There is a lot of respect to be had for players who are consistent under tighter settings, and while searching, Google tried to show me a video of someone 99ing Disconnected Disco on -0.0030 (which is really impressive, since that drops the Fantastic window from 20ms to 14ms), but as it stands, 0.0015 is the setting you will find on any unhacked machine and on a good number of hacked machines, so that should be the setting used for general play at Acme unless we agree otherwise.  Setting it wider is generally accepted to be cheating (I'd agree), but everyone seems to have calmed down and accepted 0.0015 as a reality of Roxor's uncorrected mistakes.

Personally, I'm not competitive outside of our own tournaments, so I have little reason to care what it's set to; come tournament day, we're all using the same machine.

JudgeWindowAdd is now set to 0.0015.  The difference may not be immediately apparent, but everyone will probably do something within a few sets that makes them do a double take.

Tony. I love you man...

I got 2 quads today, Wam Bam Boogie and a requad on Tribal Style, 99.74 Xuxa took the record finally, 1e 99.94 Ize Pie took the record finally.

Not to say my timing wasn't right on for those songs anyway but man it seems to be making a big difference... Please just make sure it's not actually set easier than its supposed to, but clearly you understand this extremely thoroughly so I'll trust you on this.

This was also my first time on the theme on the pad, though I've played with the basic theme on the keyboard. I wasn't sure what to think about the non flashing timing, but with the slight tweak you added after playing on the pad its pretty much perfect. The theme is overall quite awesome except for ONE PROBLEM:

My USB will load all its songs, however the machine won't save any scores (including my quadsgrumblegrumble...), and always reverts back to Pink Fuzzy Bunnies, which was the last song from the 2nd to last set I played before the theme was put on (so probably referring to the LastGood settings or whatever). It also will show "NoName" (equivalent to No Profile Data) if I leave my card in for 2 consecutive sets, and hence I've had to take my card out and put back in between sets. It will still play my custom songs, so it's not that bad, but still something I was hoping you could take a look at.

Anyway thanks again for all your efforts!

That's a diverse set of USB oddities, but, as you said, the most important stuff is there so I won't be rushing out untested changes.  Out of curiosity, is your drive using "In The Groove 2" or "In The Groove 3" as the ITG folder?  Kevin tried to tweak the ITG3 theme to use an ITG3 folder, but it didn't quite work right and Chromatic is definitely not configured for it.

I've also had a request to add the USB profile summary that shows up at the end of the set (total songs, possibly awards, the "don't forget to take your drive" message).  In general, it seems like there may just be issues with the USB metrics (they were copied wholesale from ITG2 r2's theme data and are probably unchanged) that's built into the theme.

When I have some time to play around (might be tonight, but I was already planning on doing some tournament simfile work), I'll see how much damage I do to the visuals by switching the theme to use a theme built for OpenITG (either the OpenITG default or ITG3) as a fallback on my home OpenITG build and then steadily removing unnecessary Chromatic data (A theme is a combination of visuals and functionality, Chromatic has the r2 functionality when it just needs to specify the visuals and point at a functional, well-tested theme like ITG3 for the bulk of it's functionality, thus allowing it to inherit any new features as they are added).  It should not be too hard to lean on an up-to-date OpenITG theme's functionality without noticeably changing Chromatic's appearance, and then everything should be working great.

Once we fix up Chromatic a bit, I'll probably release the fixed build, at least on here, if not somewhere with a bit more traffic.

Also, glad to hear that the flash is working.  The goal was definitely subtlety, since the original intent of Chromatic was to have very little happen when you step and I think it works well for everyone, since there's nothing eye-popping about it.

The theme is pretty damn good, and I like the way you tweaked flashing, too.  The only problem I still have is the whole "fantastics shift left or right by a pixel" deal that I wouldn't have noticed if nobody pointed it out to me.  I'm OCDing all over that shit now, though.

The one pixel shift isn't too hard for me to fix, but it's definitely something I need to do on my desktop, rather than the netbook, as it might require shifting one of Fantastic sprites (there's a separate early/late for every judgment in Chromatic) by a pixel (and the netbook is not a good graphics machine), though I'm hoping I can just tweak the sprite's dimensions or display position by a pixel to fix it without needing to do anything to the sprite file itself.  Also, editing the giant metrics.ini file on a 9" netbook screen sucks anyway.

Got to play a few sets last night, though I didn't bring a USB along for custom-testing. It was a whole lot easier, gotta say .__.
I can actually for the first time imagine myself getting a quad potentially on that machine now. Shame I cannot enter my name as "DR.Z" anymore since Chromatic has no period.

But now that the lag issues are getting some counteraction, will we be able to play those few problematic songs like "Less Than Three" without any lag, just like on Suko's machine?

I look forward to testing it out, I'll be coming through again Thursday to give it a whirl most likely near 7-7:30 as usual

That was an issue in the stepchart itself. I tried many things; reducing video dimensions, bitrate, file size, etc. In the end I had to open the stepchart in OpenITG, remove the old BG video code and put it in again from scratch in OpenITG. I dunno what code they used to put the video into the stepchart, but it's really broken.

You probably can change the "editable" file on a USB to be exactly what you wanted. Chromatic also allows for 5 letters

So BEAST is now an available for high scores hehe

I noticed this too, but damn this is a picky change, and this coming from me...

In the Groove 2 folder. Im gonna do some tweaking to my USB, delete some extraneous data, etc and see if it affects anything. Doubtful but maybe.

Damn what a beast...

Anyway thanks again for all your efforts!