Hacking EZ Omega (with Pogoshell) Alpha

[Sterophonick]

NGP Games should be 2M
Wonderswan games might have to be at least 512k

 

[Sterophonick]

How would I get the ColecoVision BIOS for Pogoshell Cologne, or the MSX BIOS for pogohsell MSXAdvance.

 

[kuwanger]

Legally you'd have to get a Colecovision/MSX and dump the BIOS. I believe the Colecovision Flashback has the BIOS in it, however a teardown shows most the system is under a big epoxy blob, and I don't think anyone has even attempted to do a dump of the BIOS on it. Sorry if that's not much help.

 

[Sterophonick]

But if you were to get the BIOS legally, how would you use it with pogoshell?

 

[kuwanger]

Use wayback to ndsretro.com, grab Cologne 0.8, and follow the readme about making a Pogoshell plugin using Cologne.exe.

 

[Sterophonick]

Great!

How easy would it be to make a text reader plugin to read text documents on the Omega?

 

[kuwanger]

Hard enough that I'd just use one of the many text/"ebook" readers?

 

[Sterophonick]

I can't seem to figure out how to get the BIOS for Cologne to work.

All that the readme says is to take the bios and an empty file.
What does FluBBa mean?

 

[kuwanger]

Use Cologne.exe and build a compilation with a bios and an empty file.

 

[Sterophonick]

That still doesn't work.

 

[kuwanger]

What's the hash of the bios and the resulting compilation?

 

[Sterophonick]

BIOS: 2c66f5911e5b42b8ebe113403548eee7
col.gba: 3f033cb9ec2a2ec47cfeee5d3fffc72e (The blank rom has no name set, there is no splashscreen)

 

[kuwanger]

I get the same result on my end and it works correctly. What's not working for you?

 

[Sterophonick]

Ok, so I change the name of col.gba to col.mb, so that it runs .col files. When I run a .col file, the emulator boots up fine, but after that I get a black screen. If I hit exit in the menu, the BIOS actually shows up properly, giving the "turn the console off" message. The ROM that I am running is Jumpman Junior.col, which I padded the size to be 65536 bytes, so that it actually boots.

Edit: I renamed it to col.gba and it works fine.

 

[kuwanger]

There really shouldn't be any need to pad out any files. Files are copied to PSRAM in blocks of 128KB with the last block cleared to all zero before loading in the last block if the last block of a file is less than 128KB. The only reason to ever pad a file is if the file was truncated in the past, the last bytes of the file were \xff, and the game actually needs those bytes to be \xff.

I wonder if something is broken with .mb since col.mbz and col.gba works fine. :/

Edit: Yea, that was it. I was copying file.col size to RAM not col.gba size to RAM. That's why padding to 64KB was having an effect. Please try the new update.

 

[Sterophonick]

What was changed?

 

[kuwanger]

.mb plugins should now work properly.

 

[Sterophonick]

K cool.
Would it be possible to allow the GBA to hard reset when launching an emulator that is a plugin?

 

[kuwanger]

It would be possible, but is there a specific reason you want that option?

 

[Sterophonick]

I tend to prefer having the GBA hard reset when I launch a game.