Well I feel rejuvenated, I went for a small holiday over the weekend to refresh the batteries and it worked. I keep being surprised by the amount of work needing to be done before release but as each day passes less and less is needed.
A bit over 300 of the 400 SMS games now have their screenshots/covers online ready for downloading in RC, this took a bit of work to collate all the data. Why not all 400? Well we haven't done the Japanese SMS/Mark III boxes yet and there are very few complete covers for these games anyhow. 98% of western/brazilian covers are done though. Hopefully once 0.700 is out people will see that if they scan their covers (all sides of the box) it actually has a use now.
Downloading works fine in RC, it takes a few seconds to download each cover (they are anywhere from 400KB -> 2000KB in size so it also depends on how many covers there are for each game) but it is working nicely with progress bars and all that other fancy stuff people expect. I will be creating a torrent and hosting it on the RC server so that the collectors out there can get them all in one bunch without doing a lot of clicking. This also means if other people seed it you will be able to download the covers very fast. The downloading from within the program is mostly to ensure everyone has the latest covers (it will tell you if the server has a better version than you currently have) and for the less technically inclined. The torrent file will likely be available to members on the download page before the actual release so keep an eye on the blog here.
Now that I have a massive collection of covers in RC to look at I realized that the way I'm displaying them just isn't that friendly. So today I will be changing that to something that is hopefully better. Even as it is though it is amazing to see the variety of covers and it adds that little extra just before you play the game. A private beta will be going out to testers tonight so things aren't too far away for a public release.