Hacking DSision2...

[leinad]

I dont understand the caching thing.

Do you have to load all the games first for the caching to work properly?

EDIT - Oh wait, nvm, I dont think you do. For some reason though, my games folder (which has about 35-ish games) still takes a while to load.

It just loads the game data once, so when opening your game folder for the first time you will most likely have a big lag during which a 1kb cache file is created under /dsision/cache for every rom .

Does it realy still takes that long to load your game folder o.o ? If yes, you tell us if there are some 1kb files at /dsision/cache ?

 

[Feels Good Man]

I dont understand the caching thing.

Do you have to load all the games first for the caching to work properly?

EDIT - Oh wait, nvm, I dont think you do. For some reason though, my games folder (which has about 35-ish games) still takes a while to load.

It just loads the game data once, so when opening your game folder for the first time you will most likely have a big lag during which a 1kb cache file is created under /dsision/cache for every rom .

Does it realy still takes that long to load your game folder o.o ? If yes, you tell us if there are some 1kb files at /dsision/cache ?

Yeah, there are 1kb files in the cache folder and it still takes a while to load up >__< (roughly around 10 seconds)

 

[spinal_cord]

weird, its very quick for me. Maybe your card is fragmented or something like that?



[edit] Does anyone use the (limited) GBA support? if no, then I'll take it out, rather than try to fix it. I'm inclined to think nobody uses it, as there have been no complaints about it not working properly

 

[leinad]

Hm, Spinal, can you try to put many files onto your card (I took about 1gb of MP3 files , 3~5mb each) and then open your game folder ? It seems that when you have more files on your card the Directory-Listening takes more time. [I mean directory listening. Not loading rom data ! ]
with the MP3 files: EVERY folder loads some time (Up to 10~20 seconds), even if there are just 2 homebrews.
without the MP3 files: Game folder opens in 1~3 seconds.

There still is room for speeding this up, because the directory-listening function is called twice to differientate Folders and normal files, It will be easy to just have it once...

@jester : To prove my these, do you have many smaller files on your card (many MP3s most likely) ?

 

[spinal_cord]

It's probably because every file that is detected is checked against the list in filetypes.ini, which means parsing the ini file for every detected file

maybe there is a better way to do that...?

 

[leinad]

It's probably because every file that is detected is checked against the list in filetypes.ini, which means parsing the ini file for every detected file

maybe there is a better way to do that...?

Well, I ment it this way:

| Root
-| Games
--| Homebrew
--| Commercial
-| Apps
-| Data
-| Music
--| Whatever
---| 1.mp3
---| ... here comes about 1gb of music

This is kinda how I organized my card
When I now open fat:/games/homebrew the fat commands are kind of slow, because the FAT maybe is verry long (the many MP3 files) which causes them to be slower on opening / searching files / even printing folder data
So there is much room for improvement in the folder-listing function. Instead of listing the dir twice we shink it down to one time. Leave the Hidden & filetypes.ini file-descriptor opened etc.

EDIT:
@jester13: Could you please try this version ? I deactivated custom file types and hidden-file list cheks and done some other tweaks... Just copy it as a .nds and boot it from any menu you like. Then compare the folder-loading time with the last release

- http://n00bey.bplaced.net/DSision_2_speedmod.nds
This is no release, just a test to find the reason for the laggs. I disabled some various features which maybe affected the loading-time and now want to know if it loads faster or not

 

[HowardC]

Hm, Spinal, can you try to put many files onto your card (I took about 1gb of MP3 files , 3~5mb each) and then open your game folder ? It seems that when you have more files on your card the Directory-Listening takes more time. [I mean directory listening. Not loading rom data ! ]
with the MP3 files: EVERY folder loads some time (Up to 10~20 seconds), even if there are just 2 homebrews.
without the MP3 files: Game folder opens in 1~3 seconds.

There still is room for speeding this up, because the directory-listening function is called twice to differientate Folders and normal files, It will be easy to just have it once...

@jester : To prove my these, do you have many smaller files on your card (many MP3s most likely) ?

Not that this is a solution, but since dsision can't play mp3 files shouldn't you have that folder hidden? Does dsision scan hidden folders?

 

[leinad]

Hm, Spinal, can you try to put many files onto your card (I took about 1gb of MP3 files , 3~5mb each) and then open your game folder ? It seems that when you have more files on your card the Directory-Listening takes more time. [I mean directory listening. Not loading rom data ! ]
with the MP3 files: EVERY folder loads some time (Up to 10~20 seconds), even if there are just 2 homebrews.
without the MP3 files: Game folder opens in 1~3 seconds.

There still is room for speeding this up, because the directory-listening function is called twice to differientate Folders and normal files, It will be easy to just have it once...

@jester : To prove my these, do you have many smaller files on your card (many MP3s most likely) ?

Not that this is a solution, but since dsision can't play mp3 files shouldn't you have that folder hidden? Does dsision scan hidden folders?

DSision only scans the folder you open up... The thing Im refering to is that when you have more files on your card ALL fat operations take some more time x|
I just realized this because I copied my music folder to the card and then it became slower... even when not touching the music folder

 

[spinal_cord]

I don't have much in the way of music on my computer, so I copied my pictures folder to my card, containing 6,724 file totalling 525mb, it made no difference to the speed... I'll try to dig out a pile of mp3's to see that that makes a difference...

 

[leinad]

I don't have much in the way of music on my computer, so I copied my pictures folder to my card, containing 6,724 file totalling 525mb, it made no difference to the speed... I'll try to dig out a pile of mp3's to see that that makes a difference...

Damn x( And my idea sounded so plausible... Hm I realy dont get why it's so slow for me when having much MP3s on my card.
However, I will just continue to clean up the loading functions... already made some good improvements

 

[charlieram]

Tried the latest version on my 4gb SDHC card and it seems like the cache does not work, the cache files are written to the card but the startup time is the same as before and games still go to white screens, on a standard 2gb card caching does seem to work and obviously games start no problem but the stylus scrolling seems to have totally messed up, icons overwrite themselves on the screen and it looks all garbled and it seems less responsive than your first stylus implementation. Last thing, can we expect a kid mode soon ?

 

[Feels Good Man]

There are A LOT of .sav files on the same folders as my games. Im pretty sure that's what's slowing it down.

Maybe caching the .sav files would help? >__< iono

 

[Skanob]

I currently am using 4GB SDHC on a fake R4 and it seems there isn't much of a change him. Everything's working fine. Although sometimes it slows down and sometimes its a bit faster.

 

[charlieram]

Sorry, replied to an old post it seems!?!

 

[HowardC]

Against my better judgment, here is the art manager I talked about. If you install the registry keys, this tool will allow you to right-click on a .nds file on your computer and install the game as well as it's cover art (downloaded from the net) to the proper dsision folders on a sd card insterted into your computer.

PLEASE READ THE README BEFORE USE!!!

DS Art Man 1.0

Feel free to put this on the first page or what have you.

 

[palasx]

it was mentioned that pre-DLDI patching the dsision2,ds would take care of the problem Dsision2 has INTERNALLY DLDI patching homebrew, even on an r4 card.

my questions is, what, EXACTLY is different between the normal dsision2.nds and the r4ds version? is it just the dldi and internal patch code? also, what version of devkit are you building this against?

thank you so much for this awesome utility, sorry if iam being a bother.

 

[Advi]

WTF? No backlight support?

I think you're kidding yourself on that point... open dsision.ini and change phat=1 to phat=0.

Proper phat detection is already implemented in the next build.

Well I for one feel stupid U_U

 

[spinal_cord]

palasx - The only difference, is that the r4 version is patched with the second version of the r4dldi (by chishm i think) and then hacked to prevent the r4 firmware from re-patching with the old patch. The loader absolutely refuses to work if it is patched by the R4 firmware.

 

[nutella]

Against my better judgment, here is the art manager I talked about. If you install the registry keys, this tool will allow you to right-click on a .nds file on your computer and install the game as well as it's cover art (downloaded from the net) to the proper dsision folders on a sd card insterted into your computer.

PLEASE READ THE README BEFORE USE!!!

DS Art Man 1.0

Feel free to put this on the first page or what have you.

Good and useful program. However, I can't get the thing to appear when I right click. Also, there seems to be a problem with the search that probably isn't your fault. Some games, such as Chrono Trigger do not appear on the search yet the game is in the database. Lastly, if you ever make another release, I think it would be useful to rename the .bmp to the same name as the rom.

Overall though, this is much, much quicker than converting each boxart by hand. Great Job.

 

[spinal_cord]

You know, there is no reason to convert the boxart, there is a link back on page 9 with a download for around 3000 commercial boxart images already converted...

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M33ZQGT9

All you need to do is rename them (they are currently ordered by release number).