Hacking GB/GBC (Goomba Color) emulator needs updating on EZ Flash Omega?

Terrum · Jul 20, 2018

@EZ-Flash2 I think the GB/GBC (Goomba Color) emulator needs updating on the EZ Flash Omega.

Some games that are on the compatibility list do not work with the EZ Flash Omega version of the Goomba emulator.

I downloaded v2.0 from their main website and compiled the broken gb games into gba and they worked fine (or as per the compatibility list).

Is it possible for the EZ Flash (Goomba Color) emulator to be updated? It is more convenient I think

Xilefian · Jul 21, 2018

The kernel is now open-source, but I'm not sure what modifications EZ Flash has done to these emulators before compiling them and shoving their binaries into the kernel (the kernel literally has the raw binaries for these emulators embedded in the code).
Someone needs to do a diff compare with the emulators in EZ Flash Omega and the official releases to check if they've been modified. If they haven't, then I imagine you can just replace the C code for the compiled binaries with the new emulators (using raw2c or similar to generate C code from the emulator binary).

If you don't understand any of what I've just written, then basically you need to wait for a programmer to do what I just explained. There's a few people discussing the idea of refactoring the Omega kernel and making it clean and easy to do things like update these emulators (and add new ones) so the dream in the future is to have a system where these emulators can be updated easily without having to replace the kernel every time.

Extra (for programmers): My thoughts are to shove the emulators into NOR flash pages so they're at least not embedded in the kernel and don't take up room on SD card, with the ability to update the emulators from SD card files into their NOR flash area as needed - probably better to just have them as SD apps - perhaps a new kernel could detect the file extension for your game and then load the correct emulator from SD? This is going into Operating System design territory.

kuwanger · Jul 21, 2018

Xilefian said:
I'm not sure what modifications EZ Flash has done to these emulators before compiling them and shoving their binaries into the kernel

Yea, I checked that a while ago (like back when I got my review copy). They're Goomba Color 12-14-2012 (Dwedit's latest version) and Pocketnes 2013-07-01 (also Dwedit's latest fork). The incompatibility comes from each progressive version of Goomba Color being more heavily optimized for speed which (1) breaks some Gameboy games and (2) sometimes even breaks some Gameboy Color games although (3) it also makes some more Gameboy Color games work well.

So, that's the chief reason I still have compilations for gb/gbc. The latest Pocketnes is really good, though, and I personally haven't had any more glitches with it.

Xilefian said:
perhaps a new kernel could detect the file extension for your game and then load the correct emulator from SD?

Uh, yea, I already did that. I've still got it labelled as beta because I don't want people complaining much if it breaks stuff (regularly games might break because I changed the soft reset) and there's always the whole bricking risk (AFAIK it's incredibly small). *shrug*

Terrum · Jul 21, 2018

kuwanger said:
They're Goomba Color 12-14-2012 (Dwedit's latest version)

kuwanger said:
Uh, yea, I already did that

I just realized that the version I was referring to wasn't actually the color version of Goomba, rather the original. Is it possible to add the original Goomba as a plugin on your Pogoshell kernel? If so I'll give it a try!

Knowing that the source code is now publicly available, it would be awesome to be able to play GB/GBC games natively like you can with GBA games on EZ Flash.

kuwanger · Jul 22, 2018

Terrum said:
I just realized that the version I was referring to wasn't actually the color version of Goomba, rather the original. Is it possible to add the original Goomba as a plugin on your Pogoshell kernel? If so I'll give it a try!

Perhaps the instructions aren't clear? You put goomba.gba into /plugins/gbb.gba (as an example) and change the extension of all games you want to play with that version of goomba to gbb. The whole point of adding the Pogoshell plugin support was to avoid having to add plugins to the kernel itself.

Hacking GB/GBC (Goomba Color) emulator needs updating on EZ Flash Omega?

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