Is it counting the length of the music or the stepchart? Some stepcharts have dead space before or after the song and this may or may not be considered "song length". I'm not sure about any of this, it's just my guess.

Allan - I think the new charts are fun, too! I think that the ACME staff wanted the "long song" cutoff to be 3:30 - and by "I think," I mean "Bill told me so in an e-mail before the con." I don't know why this exact number was chosen, though - it just seems to be what ACME wants.

Regarding the volume... yeah, it's probably pretty low. Tony and I couldn't get anybody to leave Sakuracon when the arcade was supposed to be closing so we turned the volume completely off on all of the machines so that people wouldn't want to play anymore. We told Bill's techs this, and they said they'd adjust all of the volumes on-site, but that allows a lot more of a margin for error.

So this means the machine is back at acme? I leave  early next week and was hoping to come by and say bye to whoever is there. Went last week but completely forgot about the Con. Hope to see people there this week.

Just wondering if there are plans to upgrade the boards in the SF IV machine when Super SF IV is released - Capcom just recently confirmed an arcade release as well.   I'm sure these will bring in a steady stream of quarters...

SSF, well, that is entirely up to Capcom.  If they demand to see the whole board at 6000.00 each, it would take a 12,000.00 investment to upgrade the cabinets.  Now, if they offer a reasonably priced existing system upgrade, we are down for this. 
Shame on these manufacturers, it's no wonder they have a hard time selling their product to the arcade market these days.

Has ANYONE tried the new terminator game within this group?  In general, it appears to be the best light gun shooter we have had in 5 years!  :-)

Bill, I really want to check it out, but I haven't been able to get down to Acme in over a month. I'm hoping that in the next few weeks I'll get the chance to try it out. I'll let ya know what I think.

On that note, my buddy and I played thru most of Rambo and we both seemed to get a kick out of it. Not a bad game.

It's cool that there is new songs on there, but when I tried using my flash drive it wouldn't work. Plus, picked one of the new song for my first song and the system froze and reboot so... I didn't want to risk trying any of the other ones out. Pads seem fine though. :/

New songs and flash drives have both worked fine in the past so I don't know what's up with that.

Not sure what was up then. Loaded my profile but not my songs. The song that I picked was in the Sukura Con folder, near the middle, didnt have a high score.

Regarding the USB's, they have been checked, and are functional.  But something with the program changes is causing them problems.  Allan let us know they needed to be checked, and the system is reading them.  Beyond us now. 
Is the volume at a good level now?  thanks for the heads up Sunday, Gerrack.

Ah fuck...it was working fine at the con...I'm down in California so it is hard for me to do anything for a couple of weeks. Still, I'll ask the OpenITG guys what could possibly be up tonight. I might have to install that last GB of RAM after all. Damn...worst case possible...

I thought that RAM was bought for the purpose of putting it in...  Why didn't it get put in already?

USB failures at the con were completely a function of the machine's cache overflowing and reboots did wonders.  If I ever have time, I curious to see just how the caching code works, because it doesn't seem like redirecting USB data to a secondary file which is deleted after a few sets would be that hard to add in, but I also have no knowledge of Stepmania/OpenITG's code.

What specific song caused the crash?

I'm amazed that this didn't seem to get addressed with OpenITG. I've seen many oITG machines still require restarts after a few hours of constant play. Like you, I have no idea how difficult this task is, but I imaging having it clear the oldest cached files after 1 hour or so to keep it from getting terribly glitchy with the USB drives.

rebooting the machine doesn't help after a period of time. Unless we can build in a code, we'll have to manually have the machine reload the songs which takes some time. Though it does get rid of the lag for a little bit.

Here's the thing I propose. I say we put the song limit to 20-30 songs that the machine will load from a USB, that's a decent amount in my opinion. I usually don't see people bring in 50 songs the CAN'T pass.

Also, Tony I think you can find the stepmania source code on stepmania.com
since OpenITG is based of off that, it probably shouldn't be hard to figure out once you take a look at it.

edit:
http://www.stepmania.com/download.php?file=stepmania_v390_src.zip

here's the source code for stepmania 3.9
I'm not sure if this'll help, but here ya go.

Do you think it would help matters any if we reverted to the ITG2 theme?

no, it's the same game just a different a skin over it.
For now it's something we'll have to just get into the service menu and do. It's an inconvenience, but we've been dealing with it for over a year now, so I'm sure we can all deal with it some more.

Well, I was just thinking that the theme itself was responsible for some of the lag. But meh.

If Bill's techs would be cool with coming down to ACME, I'm sure Tony could look at it a bit.

Themes modify the settings of the engine (hence why you can get custom mods, etc), so they can, and do affect the stability of the machine. I've heard on multiple occasions that the themes can cause unforeseen problems within the ITG/OpenITG engine. The ITG3 theme is notoriously unstable because there has never been an "official" release, so every version you find is slightly different than the other.  The ITG3 group really needs to just get this thing officially released and be done with all these half-finished charts and incomplete themes.

P.S. We are still running the ITG2 theme on our machine because we've had some buggy problems with the multiple ITG3 themes we've tried. There always seems to be something tweakin out in them.

As far as I know, ITG3 charts are done. honeslty look at them, there's not much to change. Also, we tried the ITG2 theme, it still lagged through Rebirth and everything else. The only thing that is going to fix the lag, is either reloading the songs every now and then, or sticking 1GB of RAM into the motherboard and BAM! FIXED!

For us it's more of a hardware issue than a software issue. Trust me on that. The theme isn't done, but we could make it done. I can't even tell you how many custom themes are on peoples machines. It's ridiculous.

Kevin, nobody said anything about the charts.  The theme is not refined enough.

Yes James, I believe he did say something about the charts.

Anyways I think the best option for anybody is to hack custom speed mods onto either your USB, or just directly put it on the machine and then run it in the ITG 2 theme. I like that one better anyways, the fantastics don't give you seizures.

Couple things.

First off, it's set now at 3:30 because that's what "Acme's staff wanted" but a week ago it was set to 4.5 min. I recommended the song lengths be set at 1 song at 4min 2 at 6 3 at >6 because it seemed reasonable, however as-is many of the songs I could play for one round before sakuracon, such as 'I Can Walk on Water' and others, are now either unplayable or take two rounds. I wouldn't mind them taking two rounds if the majority of my songs were now playable, however now there are more unplayable songs than there were before, and I think this is ridiculous. I had thought we fixed the long songs for multiple rounds thing at sakuracon but evidently not, so it would be nice if someone could actually look at it and extensively test it this time to make sure it's not just working on event mode or free play or whatever. Since we've been notoriously bad/lazy about doing this, I volunteer. Just let me know a time and I'll be at Acme to fix the problem.

Second, the volume is great! Inevitably I'm sure someone will say it's too loud so when the time comes, please be gentle, however in the meantime thanks for the change

Lastly, the USBs are definitely not working like they are supposed to. Almost every time I go to Acme now it will not read any songs my first set, so I take out and put in my USB, and it reads the same 4 songs every time, and then the next set after reloading it's maybe 10 songs, and it slowly goes up until finally it rests on a collection of maybe 20 of the 40 or so songs on my USB. Most certainly something is up. Again, I offer my services to take a good look at it and fix the problem once and for all...

As a savvy logician, as well as someone who wants this damn machine to work fairly and correctly, I guarantee I can get this thing working up to specs. Just let me know when and I'll take a look...

Allan: Just to clarify, I have no idea what the previous song limit was or why it was set the way it was. All I know is this, which was a direct quote from an e-mail Bill sent me:

"I know they cannot be too long as Acme wants the max song length at 3 minutes 30 seconds.  If they will work within that perimeter, the more the better I would say.  :-)"

Maybe ACME changed their minds? :<

I don't know what the deal with USBs is. They were, for sure, working at the con, and since it's not hardware it has to be something with the machine settings. Was ANYTHING different at the con other than the machine being on freeplay? Do coin settings themselves take any RAM?

Also, regarding the ITG2 theme VS the ITG3 theme - I appreciate what you're trying to say, Kevin, but I think that if several people suspect the theme might be contributing to the lag at all it might be worth at least testing. If we do nothing, we can guarantee we'll continue to have problems; if we do something and it doesn't work, we can always change it back. Edit: Oh nvm you agree with me anyway. No worries, then!

Edit: Also, did we set a limit for what the machine will read off of USBs at the con? I wasn't involved in that, but if somebody did set a limit and your R21 files are above a certain length, maybe that's why it's not reading them? :O

Allan this is how song length works.
There are two options.

One for MAXIMUM song length.
Another for setting long song and marathin cut offs.
We put it at what ACME wanted, we can't change that, because it's in their venue.
it was set at 4:00 minutes not 4:30 seconds, how do I know this? I tried playing Holy Orders and that song is barely over the 4:00 minute mark.
Right now the absolute cut off is at 3:30 meaning anything above that limit will not play. I cut the limit of songs you can load onto your usb be for one reason.
Bringing in 50 songs everytime you go to acme will make the machine lag a lot faster than 20 songs. That and really, I think we need to start putting more popular songs on the machine itself. For instance, Loituma and stuff.
We should make a folder called PNWBemani or something.
Since I know how put songs on the machine, I volunteer to do this.
Also, with song length, if it's really a problem I would gladly go back and change everything to make sure it works if Bill will let me.

Laura, changing the theme doesn't make a difference with lag, it's the machine not cleaning the cache is the problem. Personally I wish we could have the ITG2 theme with al the custom mods, but eh, whatevs.

On a happier note, I changed the file size so songs over 5mb can be loaded.
Because if any of you know a thing or two audio, 5mb is shit....absolute shit for song quality.