 _____               _     _____ _____ 
|  _  |___ ___ ___ _| |___|_   _|  |  |
|     |  _|  _| .'| . | -_| | | |  |  |
|__|__|_| |___|__,|___|___| |_|  \___/

MENU FOR NEO GEO 161in1 MULTICART

Based on the work of Vortex
Used Furrtek's "Hello World" example code
Ongoing discussion on arcade-projects.com

This aims to be an alternative menu for a modded chinese 161in1 v3 multicart that was fully reverse engineered by vortex in 2023.

Building

On Windows use the build.bat file to start the toolchain. When everything works as expected you'll find the menu-p1.bin romfile in the MAME\roms\menu folder.

Run the menu in MAME

Although this was made to be used on real hardware, you can run it in MAME:

The easy way:

Add a MAME executable to the MAME folder
Add a bios (neogeo.zip) to MAME/roms
Run build.bat
Run emu.bat or debug.bat to launch MAME

In your own MAME folder:

Run build.bat
Open MAME\hash\neogeo.xml from this repository in any text editor and copy the element <software name="menu"> till </software> into the neogeo.xml from your MAME folder.
copy the folder MAME\roms\menu (where the roms are located) to your MAME setup.
Open a commandline terminal in your MAME folder and run MAME like this: mame.exe neogeo -cart1 menu or mame.exe neogeo -cart1 menu -debug if you want debugging features.

How to Play

Control	Function
Up	former list index
Down	next list index
Left	previous page
Right	next page
A	launch games
B	toggle game infos
C	unused
D	toggle credit screen

Gamelist

The list-entries in the rom come from the gamelist.asm file which is included upon building the rom. It has several sections to store data that has relations to other data, such as MEG-count, release year, publisher and category.

[!] The order of your gameslist and the roms you flashed to your ICs need to match. Please double check the ordering!

You can generate both gameslist.asm and games.txt dynamically from my generator. Just follow the instructions on the page.

This is not about any "Master List" or Homebrew-Conversions - it's a cart with flash-roms that can hold any software the system is capable of (some mapper limitations apply), so please do not see my Google Sheet as "This must be on your cart", but as a template for the correct format to get your own folder-contents into a) a gameslist.asm for building the custom menu and b) the games.txt for the vortex compiler that packs your roms into big binaries for programming your chips. The Google Sheet could as well be empty, but then you would have to fill all the meta data yourself.

Limitations

Text	Max characters
List Entry	32
Game Info	22
Megs	3

Rolel/neogeo-menu