ZodNEO
-------

Ported and Optimised for the Tapwave Zodiac by Fangorn.

This is a NEOGEO MVS emulator based on MAME v0.36. It uses its own memory
manager for handling large games so that UDMH is not required. It's memory
manager also protects writes to the storage area so it won't wipe out the
Zodiac if there is a crash.

The Cyclone 68000 ASM CPU is used but for some games it has been disabled
due to incompatibilites. You can see which game uses Cyclone in the 
MAME "Game Information" status window.

ZodNEO is a spin off of ZodMAME and was split so that memory can be managed 
differently (hence no need for UDMH), plus other parts of the drivers
could be optimised directly for NEOGEO games. 

Most games are supported, even the large ones, but some have been disabled
due to incompatibility issues and colour corruption (e.g. mslug2).

ISSUES
------

* 16bit colour support isn't fully implemented so some 16bit games will 
  have freaky graphics, most games work fine though.
* Stereo Sound is supported but none of the games currently play fast
  enough with the sound switched on to make this useable.


INSTALLING
----------

Simply Hotsync the ZodNEO-Installer.prc file and this will automatically 
install the program, make sure your SD card is inserted into Slot1 before
doing this.

You'll need the following directory structure on the SD card:
/PALM/Programs/ZodNEO/roms/

Put your 0.36 version NEOGEO ROMS (zipped) into the roms directory on the SD card.
They MUST be 0.36. Don't forget to put the NEOGEO.ZIP BIOS file in there or none of
the games will work. You can use clrmamepro (or RomCenter) to create 0.36 roms 
from the latest versions of MAME. This isn't easy as the NEOGEO ROM structure 
was changed in MAME 0.80.

NOTE: The best way to get your latest MAME roms into 0.36 format is to use the ROLLBACK
ROMS, have a search on google for "mame romset rollback torrent". I prefer ROMCENTER
for fixing the roms. You'll need to generate a v0.36 datfile for ROMCENTER, there's
information on this around the Internet. Get the NEOGEO roms you want to convert 
into a seperate directory, add that path to ROMCENTER, then add the path of the 
ROLLBACK ROMS and your original latest version MAME ROMS. Select the path with your 
ROMS you want to convert, choose the ROMS to convert, right click and do "Fix". It 
then magically converts them to v0.36 format!


USING IT
--------

NOTE: Make sure bluetooth is switched off for maximum performance - it does
slow down the emulator - use BlueFang.

The games listed will show the game as being available on the SD card if the
colour of the Game Description is in blue, if it is black it isn't available.

If you run a game and it comes right back to the menu then it means your
romset is invalid, not found or your don't have enough memory.

All the controls are preconfigured for the Zodiac. 
* Four action keys (coloured) map to the Player 1-4 buttons. These also map to
a right joystick for games such as Robotron, BattleZone, etc.
* Right trigger - add coins
* Left trigger - player one start
* Function - UI menu, use joystick select for enter key
* Power Button - pauses the game
* Launcher - Exit (escape key).

The touch screen is split into 4 areas as follows:
* Top Right - switch off/on throttling and frameskip. Useful during the
initialisation phase of a game to speed up the game. Can also be used for
games that don't run at full speed and you would prefer smoother framerate.
* Bottom Right - switches Frame Rate display on and off.
* Top Left - nothing (spare key which generates A key)
* Bottom Left - nothing (spare key which generates C key)


ZodNEO's homepage is at:
http://zodiacstuff.sourceforge.net/ The source code is in SVN (Subversion).

ZodNEO is a free program, developed in my own time. Any donations are
appreciated, and will provide incentive to carry on developing it :)

RELEASES
--------

v1.2 23/05/2006
* Fixes for Zodiac 1 memory usage
* More games have disabled Cyclone core.

v1.1 13/05/2006 
* Uses Cyclone ARM core in many games
* Memory manager can now handle much larger games
* Added better 16bit colour support, not perfect but most games work well.
* Some performance improvements to graphics drawing code
* Fixed bug which didn't fully deallocate Feature Memory
* Underclock the MAME CPUs a bit more to extract faster performance.
* Reduced sound sample rate to increase performance.


v1.0 05/05/2006 - Initial Release


THANKS
------

Thankyou to the Tapwave staff (who are sadly no more) for bringing us this
excellent, but overlooked, PDA.

Thanks to all the crazy guys on emuboards.com.


OTHER SOFTWARE OF MINE
----------------------

The following are all available at http://zodiacstuff.sourceforge.net/
ZSpectrum (Zodiac ZX Spectrum Emulator)
CliFrotz (PalmOS Interactive Fiction Interpreter)
ZodSCUMM (ScummVM interpreter for those Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle etc games)
ZodMAME (MAME emulator for playing those old arcade games)


Enjoy
Simon Quinn (aka Fangorn)
Great Britain, 2006
