Hacking Dios Mios Lite

[G0dLiKe]

This is the official DML thread on GBATemp​

Changelog, find latest updates here:
The new improved DML

Spoiler

http://code.google.com/p/diosmioslite/

The discontinued revs

Spoiler

http://code.google.c...ect/source/list

Donations:​

​

Donations are welcome and highly appreciated ​

Recommended SD card type(s):
SDHC cards up to 32GB can be used for DML, class 10 is recommended, Sandisk products giving the best outcome.
To avoid confusion and non-functional or lagging games you need to format your SD card to FAT32 64KB clusters


Some clarification on how this all got to where we are ATM

Spoiler

Well, nice job guys. I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't surprised at how quickly g0dlike has recouped what he had spent on saving DML.. I can say with certainty that you have surprised crediar.

Now for a little back-story. I've gotten to know crediar fairly well, since even before the SNEEK beta, and we've spoken a number of times on this particular topic. It's fair to say that he had become disillusioned with the fact that all the time and hard work he was putting into these projects was for absolutely nothing. I certainly can't blame him for feeling this way, and neither should any of you.

So, a few months ago when crediar had decided to sell his work on DML, I could tell instantly that he at least somewhat regretted having had to make that decision. This became more and more evident with all of the guidance he had given to WiiPower in these recent months.
Now, let this in no way impugn the work WiiPower has done on the open source, however the fact remains, (and WiiPower has stated himself) that it was in fact crediar who has been the one providing the real meat to any of these advancements, and wants to continue his work on what should still be considered to be his project.

This leads us to the YouTube video. It's purpose should have been clear, and the resulting donations seem to have served that purpose much more efficiently than we had anticipated. The intent was to wipe the slate clean with g0dlike in order to get back on track.

No doubt the slower among you are asking yourselves what track that might be. Well simply stated, as long as there's a little donation money coming in, DML will continue to improve. If it were to stop, then so goes crediar's will to work on it. This way, everyone is happy. That seems fair, doesn't it? You really can't fault a person for striving for the ideal of getting a little bit of cash for doing work they enjoy.
Since crediar's usual paypal address is no longer useable, we asked g0dlike's friend who then agreed to forward any funds donated to crediar.

Now for the fun stuff.

First of all, the current Temp compatibility list needs to be knocked down, and again started from scratch. This is a new beast. The new DML version features new patch code that now allows reads to be done async instead of sync. Simply said, DML no longer pauses the game to make a read but let's the game continue. Once the read is complete it sends an IRQ, just like it would work when playing from a real disc.

This alone gets rid of most if not all lags in any game and also fixes many games that just crashed, like Luigi's Mansion or Kirby Air Ride. It's true that we still have to abide the SD code's bottleneck of 2077KB/s, however in all but rare cases, load times are actually faster than disc due to the quicker access times. You still want to be using a card formatted as 64K clusters.

There are still some things that are planned to be improved upon:
-No-Disc
-NMM support
-Two disc support
-Fix non-working games
If you would like to see a bug fixed, it'd be a great idea to append a note of said bug to any donations made, as this is more likely to be prioritized.

The new official IRC channel is #DML on EFNet.

In regards to the triforce part of the video, that was just a small teaser and in no way related to DML at all. So far no game is playable and everything works with hardcoded patches. F-ZeroAX does some weird stuff and will probably never work like this. This is highly experimental and may never completely work, but who knows. There are absolutely no guarantees that this will ever be released.

Well, that's it. The new revision has been committed to the SVN. If you use it, give what you can. Have fun!

For a tutorial see FIX94´s one linked at the bottom of this post under WebLinks, thank you for that

Development of DML:
Crediar
WiiPower

Other people who works on DML related stuff:
FIX94
obcd
scooby74029
OverjoY
conanac
exp0wnster

Development is going on and showing great progress, DML is now executable through WiiPowers NeoGamma loader, Postloader3 and WiiFlow and doesnt need SNEEK any more, it is working on real Nand now

Any questions, thoughts and constructive critics are welcome.

WebLinks aka downloads:

Spoiler

DML compatibility list on WikiTemp: http://wiki.gbatemp....patibility_List

DML SD Card speedtest: http://wiki.gbatemp....Card_Speed_Test

Google source code page: http://code.google.c...source-project/

DML HowTo thread by Fix94: http://gbatemp.net/t...__fromsearch__1

WiiFlow: http://gbatemp.net/t...gui-usb-loader/

Postloader3: http://gbatemp.net/t...84-postloader3/

NeoGamma: http://gbatemp.net/t...ogamma-r9-beta/

Users which donated and made the new release happen:

Spoiler

PabloACZ
JoshuaKing
Supercool330
andrewhan4
Kurems
Wever
FIX94
RadicalR
Slowking
Badablek
dancemonkey
larys
gameshark
R2-D2199
Stranno
Again, thanks for donating

Have fun with DML

 

[obcd]

I am interested to proceed with the development of DM and DML.
If the money you payed is really what people are saying here, you will need a lot of fund raisers to become even.
What prove can you deliver that you actually own the sources now? I mean, I could tell that as well.
Also, will I need to pay to be able to continue the programming? It's the world upside down. If I do programming for buisiness,
I get paid for it, not the other way around. I don't mind doing stuff for free if it's in my interest zone, but paying for it...
It's pretty complicated stuff, even for the end user to get a working setup. This limits the number of enthousiasts a bit.
I hope you don't mind me being a little sceptical. As always, I am open for comment.

 

[G0dLiKe]

Thanks for the interest obcd, no it should be like that:

Developers get access to the source, develop it further, release it and get some donations, which should fill the fundraiser for the source.

So that end users actually see that someone is working on it, can donate to the devs/fundraiser to get a working product.

 

[obcd]

Makes more sense.

Maybe it could work with a test version that works for a limited amount of time.
If the end users find it usefull, they can get the unlimited version for a small fee.
And they get all further updates like 1 year for free.

They don't pay for the program itself, but for the support that is given to make it work on their system.

Or you need to find some advertisers, and put their stuff in the startup of the free version.
That way, nobody should complain about it. (They will anyhow.)

Just some ideas. You probably have more already than I do.

 

[WiiPower]

The GPL doesn't work that way. And nobody knows if there will be anybody who is able to add real improvements. From what i have heard, the biggest construction site is the sd card read code. And i think the reads are executed sync and not async like they should. Normally the game would call the read, and then continue to do its stuff, like playing the music, until the read is finished. With a sync read, everything halts until the read is finished, which should be the cause of those audio glitches.

If it can't play games with .elf files right now, 007 Agent under Fire for example(but don't expect Everything or Nothing), that should be fixable. As well as the Wind Waker Dungeon Map freeze. And if there's no 2 disc game support, that should be doable as well. But other than that, i wouldn't want to promise anything.

You need to do something i don't like, to think about how to get money out of a free and voluntary project. Setting up a Google Code project right now could be the best thing to do, but could also be the worst, i have no idea.

Hmm, on a 2nd thought, you could do something like this:
Somebody wrote the WW Dungeon map support, and set a goal for its release. When xxx bucks were donated in total, the feature will get released.

 

[obcd]

I don't know exactly how audio playing is handeled in the wii, but most implementations I have seen play audio using dma and transferring the audio buffer that way without intervention of the processor. When the buffer has finished playing, an interrupt is generated to tell the program to fill the buffer with new audio data. Reading data from a media synchronously or asynchronously doesn't make much of a difference. As long as the data you need hasn't been read, you can't continue. Writing data is different, as that can happen in the background. Writing data to flash media like sd cards is also more time consuming than reading. When you play a game, besides gamesaves, there is not much to write.

I am just trying to say that the sd issue could be more complex than just async / sync reading.
Audio glitches can occur when the interrupt is disabled to long so that the playing buffer becomes empty and no new data is available.
The glitches seem to appear less frequent with a fast sd card. Maybe there is room for improvment to the sd card driver.

The idea to release only when enough money came in doesn't make sense either.
You will have plenty of people that donate without knowing for sure that the final goal will ever be reached.
What will you do if the goal isn't reached? refund those people?
And how are they suposed to know that the product they donate for is any good, if it hasn't been released yet.

 

[snikerz]

Just remember that you have to release all sources, because you're still using sven's sdhc code. crediar was granted the GPL exception of releasing DML without giving out sources, but that doesn't apply to this new project.

 

[Cyan]

do not release only when you reach enough fund.
users won't donate (or here "buy it", as if they need to pay to get something it's not a free decision from their part) without knowing if you really have the sources, if it's working, improved etc.
It's not sure it can be improved before the developers look into it. So you can't ask the users to pay before working on it either.

G0dLiKe asked me my opinion before posting here, and I said as a community, providing the full sources as GPL now (or when you found developers who decided to work on it) is a better choice. (googlecode is an idea. git too, for multiple branches if needed).

Developers then work on it and could decide that the first donations could go to the fund raising to reimburse the source or/and to the developers who improved it.

I think the users should donate if they feel like it, and don't force them to pay before hand. (it can be sold after development, as a final product, GPL allows that. but users can always compile it themselves for free too).

edit:
@obcd:
Of course, developers don't need to pay for the sources as it will be GPL.
Ideally, it should be base on donation (only?), I don't know if it would reach the paid price, but the sources will help the community.
Thanks to g0dLiKe for his decision and sharing the sources.

edit2:
Though, the sources can be released only on the first new DML release under the GPL license. You can make a private googlecode page for devs to work on it together and make it public on first release.
But the more you improve it before the first release, the less you get donations. if you open it too soon, everyone else can improve it and get their own donation too.
Up to the developers working on it to decide when is the best time.

 

[tueidj]

Just remember that you have to release all sources, because you're still using sven's sdhc code. crediar was granted the GPL exception of releasing DML without giving out sources, but that doesn't apply to this new project.

Funny, I asked sven if he granted permission for it to be sold - he said he did not.

 

[SanGor]

Just remember that you have to release all sources, because you're still using sven's sdhc code. crediar was granted the GPL exception of releasing DML without giving out sources, but that doesn't apply to this new project.

Funny, I asked sven if he granted permission for it to be sold - he said he did not.

and who says crediar sold sven's code?

 

[tueidj]

Not I. snikerz implied it, to which I responded.

 

[SanGor]

Not I. snikerz implied it, to which I responded.

but you run up to sven and implied to him that crediar sold his code.

 

[tueidj]

No, I asked if he had permission.

 

[WiiPower]

Just remember that you have to release all sources, because you're still using sven's sdhc code. crediar was granted the GPL exception of releasing DML without giving out sources, but that doesn't apply to this new project.

Funny, I asked sven if he granted permission for it to be sold - he said he did not.

Hmm, i was under the impression Crediar used the sdhc code from BootMii or some other puplic source. And then he got Sven's permission to release his DML as closed source, while the sdhc code is under GPL.

If Crediar got some sdhc code from Sven that's not puplic, then this project has a big problem. And if that's the case, tell that and explain it. I expect you to know how it is, and your post leaves that wide open.

 

[tueidj]

Why would you assume that?
When crediar tweeted that the source was for sale, I asked sven if he had given permission for crediar to sell the SD code. He said definitely not. So there are 2 possibilities:
- If crediar did pass on the SD code, he shouldn't have because he had no right to do so.
- If he didn't, the new owner presumably needs something to replace it (without which the project is non-functional/worthless). If the code from bootmii is used (good luck with that) then the project will have to be GPL, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case if some other SD code is used.

 

[WiiPower]

So you don't know if there is a problem, only that there might be one. Does anybody have the BootMii source so G0dLiKe can compare the code? One part of the source for BootMii is missing, that i know, but i think it's the code for the BootMii GUI. And the code that runs on ARM and loads the ppc.dol from sd is part of the released source.

 

[jonthedit]

I highly doubt crediar would release the SD code. I highly doubt you'll be able to use bootmii's SD code... good luck anyway.

 

[obcd]

sneek contains sdhc code as well.
As it's also a creation from Crediar, it wouldn't suprise me that he used that for his DML and NMM as well.
It's probably very similar to the mini sdhc implementation used in bootmii.

As far as I know, he might have sold his sources without the sdhc.c, with the message to get that file from the sneek source chain.

It makes the final product gpl, but for the rest he isn't doing something wrong. He just sold his sources.

I don't know the exact legal aspect of it, but who will start a case?
The question I am asking is, what is the purpose of this discussion?

 

[tueidj]

The purpose is to show that the OP is not automatically bound by the GPL as snikerz suggested (unless he was sold code that the seller did not have permission to sell).

 

[G0dLiKe]

Thanks for all your thoughts guys, this will be a GPL release for sure, I was thinking of giving devs access to the source, private googlecode seems to be a good platform to start off.

Donations part is expected to work like Cyan said, also a good idea would be with the time limit like obcd mentioned, a small fee for the final product and support, sounds great.

Other than that, 2 devs on board atm, time to get started, I´m gonna set up a private googlecode for this asap.

Thanks for reading.