Homebrew GBARunner2

[Gericom]

This means that Final Fantasy 4, the Mario Advance games are already sram patched. You don´t have to patch them again.

It's strange because as far as I know the sma games need patching actually.

 

[Deleted User]

@Gericom
I plan to get back to testing gba games with the latest gbarunner2 ARM9 build tomorrow.

I will test the latest ARM9 build f89fac5 (2018/07/10), and compare it with previous versions 83108c7 (2018/03/04), 17694d4 (2017/05/22).

I will use my Nintendo DS phat, and M3 real Flashcard for testing and post the results in the gbarunner2 wiki.

 

[Gericom]

@Gericom
I plan to get back to testing gba games with the latest gbarunner2 ARM9 build tomorrow.

I will test the latest ARM9 build f89fac5 (2018/07/10), and compare it with previous versions 83108c7 (2018/03/04), 17694d4 (2017/05/22).

I will use my Nintendo DS phat, and M3 real Flashcard for testing and post the results in the gbarunner2 wiki.

Great! Will you try both the cache and normal version to report which one works better as well? Also if you might run into the save corruption issue, it would probably be interesting to have a dump of your sd card.

 

[Deleted User]

Yes, I will test both cache and normal version.
I get back to you should there be a save corruption issue.

Edit: Good News is that everything is set up, I´m testing.
Bad News is the Internet Connection at my place is dog slow right now.
In worst case I will have to upload a txt file with the test results in this post.

Edit2: Had some issues with my M3 Flashcard. I use a spare to continue testing. Going to update the wiki soon!
Wanna give a shout out to my previous M3 Card I used for years and maybe a 1000 times or more!

 

[bobrocks95]

@bobrocks95 Does your sd card still invoke the save corruption issue? I might have found the issue, but I can't test it when I fix it atm because I can't reproduce the issue myself.

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm unable to recreate any SD card corruption using the same backups I believe I was using prior. There's a small chance I deleted a non-SRAM-patched Mother 3 backup and that's what was triggering the issue?

This is with HiyaCFW v1.3.2, whatever version of GBARunner2 was included with DSiMenu++ version 6.0.0 (looks like the 7/10 build, not sure which one though), and using unlaunch version 1.4.

I know that prior I was using version 0.8 or 0.7 of unlaunch, and version 1.0's patch notes include these lines on the DS mode:

• enter_nds_mode: reloc 2FFFxxxh to 23FFxxxh, set 4MB-RAM, NDS-ROM, ARM9 67MHz
• enter_nds_mode: set NDS-TSC-touchscr mode, init NDS-Wifi, NDS-SNDEXCNT

Maybe this was unlaunch not setting things up properly before?

 

[JSherman]

I implemented sd saving in commit f89fac5 on the branch sd_save.

Edit: because of a little bug, your bios.bin needs to be at the root of your sd card. In the gba folder it won't work!!

Not super savvy on what the differences between these four versions would be. Is anyone able to explain the arm9 vs arm7 and normal vs cache?

Thanks!

 

[Gericom]

Not super savvy on what the differences between these four versions would be. Is anyone able to explain the arm9 vs arm7 and normal vs cache?

Thanks!

Arm7 means dldi (sd access functions) run on arm 7. This is needed for 3ds and dsi sd access and for some flashcards, it may be a little bit slower though, so if arm9 works, use arm9 instead.
Cache means that the instruction cache is enabled for the internal work memory. Since games copy code there that needs to be executed fast, it can result in large speedups, however, some games will act weird or crash, for example because they use self-modifying code or something (and then data is only modified in memory and not in the cache). So if that works, it's great, but if a game doesn't work, it may work better on the normal version.

 

[dazazazle]

Thx a lot Gericom, i beat a game twice on this emulator

 

[Gericom]

@Dodain47 I saw you have been making progress on the wiki. Thanks a lot for doing all this, it's really helpful for me to determine which games I should look at to improve. There have been some regressions appearently. I should be able to get those games working again, it's probably a stupid oversight that was lost in a cleanup or something.

 

[Deleted User]

Sure thing! Hope you are doing well.

 

[Gericom]

Sure thing! Hope you are doing well.

My arms are still not what they have been, but they are improving and I'm able to do most stuff again as long as I take enough pauses.

 

[Gericom]

@Dodain47 Is it really so that some games broke after commit f9e6ded (so starting with 83108c7 non-working)? It seems strange, because nothing really significant related to the emulation changed there.

 

[Deleted User]

@Dodain47 Is it really so that some games broke after commit f9e6ded (so starting with 83108c7 non-working)? It seems strange, because nothing really significant related to the emulation changed there.

I always start testing with the latest arm9 build f89fac5. If a game for some reason does not boot with the latest version, I go back until I find a build where the game works. I got no idea why it´s this version.

 

[Gericom]

I always start testing with the latest arm9 build f89fac5. If a game for some reason does not boot with the latest version, I go back until I find a build where the game works. I got no idea why it´s this version.

I'll check out what's happening there then.
Edit: It seems that you actually meant that it broke in f9e6ded, for example the music in Barbie the island princess (sort of, I guess the samplerate is wrong) works in 091719f, but not the commit after that. It makes sense, since I cleaned up some code there. Something might have been broken.
Edit2: The sound for this specific game broke in commit bd2eca where I rewrote dma handling
Edit3: I managed to get the sound back. I ignored the dma enable bit for rom reads, so it even ran a transfer while it was 0. It still sounds shitty in that game though, but I have no idea why.
Edit4: Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree seems to have stopped working with that dma rewrite as well, but is not fixed by the fix mentioned above
Edit5: The remaining bad sound of barbie should be related to slave timer mode. In this mode a timer counts when the timer below it overflows. Because those timers already run at the right rate, their reload value should not be multiplied by 2.
Edit6: I implemented the fix and the sound is fine now. I also fixed berenstain by rejecting all dma transfers to invalid destinations (< 0x02000000 for example). Berenstain did a dma transfer to 0 for example, which on ds corrupted my itcm data. On gba bios is protected against both reading and writing. This also fixes Army Men - Operation Green

 

[Gericom]

New version! Commit 6522414 (1/11/2018) of the sd_save branch
Changelog:

• Fixed the dma regression that was introduced in commit bd2eca2 (fixes lots of games that used to work, but broke after that commit)
• Fixed the frequency of timers in slave mode (fixes the music in Barbie as the island princess for example)

@Dodain47 Could you retest the games that regressed with this new version? Most should be fixed.

 

[Deleted User]

Okay, I start from the beginning!

 

[Song of storms]

New version! Commit 6522414 (1/11/2018) of the sd_save branch
Changelog:

• Fixed the dma regression that was introduced in commit bd2eca2 (fixes lots of games that used to work, but broke after that commit)
• Fixed the frequency of timers in slave mode (fixes the music in Barbie as the island princess for example)

@Dodain47 Could you retest the games that regressed with this new version? Most should be fixed.

Thank you for this! Decent gba cartridges are getting more and more difficult to find.

 

[Gericom]

Okay, I start from the beginning!

You really don't have to retest everything. If games worked okay, this probably won't change anything.

 

[Deleted User]

You really don't have to retest everything. If games worked okay, this probably won't change anything.

Alright, then I will retest the games that were broken (barbie game, Beerenstain etc..) and use this version from now on.

 

[Gericom]

Alright, then I will retest the games that were broken (barbie game, Beerenstain etc..) and use this version from now on.

Yeah. I tested Aggressive Inline, and that one also works now. So gray wiki entries should be retested as well.