LuigiBlood said:
About your wiki, i can help, i'm working on a Super Mario Advance 4 eCard Maker (which right now, can read Level Cards and can make Demo and Power-Up Cards). And i have the whole set of No-Intro's e-Cards, so i can do something ^^
That'd be a great help, thanks. I really want to take this as far as possible, so any help at this point is much appreciated.
QUOTE(DanTheManMS @ Jan 24 2010, 12:15 PM) In theory, you should be able to use PocketNES_compy for any NES game (up to 256 KB) and have it still work, not just mapper 0 games. I only mentioned the mapper 0 part because those are likely to be the the only ones that will work with the E-reader's built-in NES emulator.
The key thing to remember is that the GBA only has two ways of running stuff: executing from cartridge ROM, and executing from RAM ("multiboot mode"). I don't think the E-reader has anything fast enough to run GBA code directly (though I've done zero research so I could very well be wrong), so it sounds like it runs stuff by using multiboot mode, in which case everything must fit into the 256 KB of RAM that the GBA has. That's why PocketNES_compy is useful. While the normal version of PocketNES only supports NES games up to 190 KB when in multiboot mode, PocketNES_compy uses a special, custom compression system in order to compress games that are up to 256 KB so that the game and the emulator both fit entirely into the GBA's RAM.
Of course you can put multiple NES games into the *.gba compilation as long as the total filesize doesn't exceed 256 KB.
EDIT: Goomba also supports multiboot mode, but finding Gameboy games small enough to work would be a definite challenge.
Yeah, it seems the e-reader does only accept mapper 0 ROMs, and about the NES to GBA, I did manage to convert Transformers Convoy no Nazo and get that working on GBA as well (although, who would want to play that crap game, I have no idea). Unfortunately, both it and Warpman run a little slow. Just a little bit. They seem to run fine in No$GBA, but slow in VBA, and ever so slightly slow on my EZ Flash 3-in-1. So it looks like I'll have to fiddle around a bit more.
It definitely seems that most of the e-reader apps run through the GBA's RAM (I never realised that was what multiboot mode was, to be honest), but it seems that the e-reader has it's own RAM, which perhaps means you could the app split in two parts - one on the e-reader, one on the GBA.
Actually, as a side note, it'd be interesting to see if anything could be done with the e-reader and DS ROMs i.e. plug e-reader into DS, use a hacked or homebrewed game on a flash card in slot 1. Many games, like Guitar Hero and Pokemon, use the GBA slot for things, so I don't see it being an impossible task. Heck, New Super Mario Bros. could be hacked to do similar things as Super Mario Advance 4.
I think my biggest problem is converting to raw. The nvpktool.exe and all the other tools are confusing. It seems you can only run them through command line, but I'm not very experienced with command line. I did get it working though. For Warpman, I put Warpman.nes in the same directory as nvpktool.exe. Then, once I had changed to the correct directory in command prompt, I just entered: nvpktool.exe -i Warpman.nes -o Warpman.raw -c
That worked, and made a .raw file. I is for input, O is for output, C is for compress, and D is for decompress. There are a bunch of others, but there's no need to use most of them for just compressing/converting. However, it gives a read error in VBA using my e-reader ROM. So I'm stumped. At least for now.
EDIT: I made a mistake. I'm meant to compress the NES file, then use Flash Maker to convert to RAW. It still doesn't work, but I think I will need to fiddle for a bit. Flash Maker does have the option of converting NES, Z80, or GBA though, so I will try to get GBA working as well. I've had no luck with it so far either though.
I wish Tim and Caitsith could actually put some instructions and tutorials on their websites. I might email them if I can't figure it out after a few more tries. That might actually get us further, since they know quite a bit about this stuff, but have only shared a little bit of information, and their tools.
I think an MBV2 cable would be helpful with this sort of development, but the only store I have found them on has them for US$20 + shipping. I don't know if they'd even ship to New Zealand, but even if they do, it's going to cost me an arm and a leg for the whole thing. I guess it's worth it though. Lik-sang might have had it cheaper, but they no longer exist, which kind of sucks, because I never got to use their service, and apparently it was pretty good. The website I found was
http://www.hk-video-games-gear.com/buy/1415 but it seems to be affiliated with Lik-sang, and also seems to be no longer running (at least not properly).