New repository for Kuwanger's Pogoshell mod5

[nuvandibe]

As far as anyone I know can tell, Kuwanger passed away in August of 2019. He was a really cool person and I wish I could have gotten to know him.

He did a lot of work on GBA homebrew, especially in keeping Pogoshell alive after its developer no longer had the time to maintain it.

Seeing as the only places left that his work can be found are on archive.org and scattered personal folders, I went and gathered up as much of his source code for Pogoshell 2.0b mod5 and published them, along with their releases, on Github. It's all versioned and delta'd accurately per revision so it's easy to browse the changes between the 30 or so revisions he released.

Here it is: https://github.com/NuVanDibe/Pogoshell-K

Edit #1:
Also I'd like to spotlight Sterophonic's Pogoshell repository here: https://github.com/Sterophonick/Archive-PogoShell

 

[FAST6191]

He did seem to vanish randomly one day. Sad to hear that, he was a really decent guy whenever I talked to him and seriously knowledgeable about the sorts of things we deal with around here.
Would also appear to be confirmed by
https://web.archive.org/web/20110723175010/http://kuwanger.net/resume/ https://www.goodwincaleharnish.com/obituary/michael-thornbury

Might be worth seeing what can be found for all his other forks and projects as there was some very good stuff among all that.

 

[Takokeshi]

Not pogoshell, but I would say this is worth backing up, especially since the actual ez4 skin extractor seems not to be available anywhere else anymore.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181020203713/http://kuwanger.altervista.org/default_skin.zip

Python script to extract resources from ezfla_up.bin

 

[nuvandibe]

He did seem to vanish randomly one day. Sad to hear that, he was a really decent guy whenever I talked to him and seriously knowledgeable about the sorts of things we deal with around here.
Would also appear to be confirmed by
https://web.archive.org/web/20110723175010/http://kuwanger.net/resume/ https://www.goodwincaleharnish.com/obituary/michael-thornbury

Might be worth seeing what can be found for all his other forks and projects as there was some very good stuff among all that.

I saw that, yeah. It's how I made the connection. I also went ahead and put both the obituary and guestbook on the wayback machine.

Not pogoshell, but I would say this is worth backing up, especially since the actual ez4 skin extractor seems not to be available anywhere else anymore.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181020203713/http://kuwanger.altervista.org/default_skin.zip

Python script to extract resources from ezfla_up.bin

I'll talk to Sterophonic about getting this on their repo

Edit: It's added

 

[nuvandibe]

[snip] sorry about double post

 

[patters]

That's a pity. I thought it was a bit concerning that he had stopped posting, and I hoped it wasn't for this reason
I recall giving him lots of feedback as he worked on that mod5 fork of pogoshell in about 2005/6 perhaps - many improvements were things I had directly asked for over at PocketHeaven. He tended not to update the release notes properly and used forum posts to announce changes instead. Unfortunately all that information has been washed away like writing scratched into a sandy beach, despite Web Archive. I know this because I've been trying to find the one build that I had used to make a decent PogoShell compilation on my F2A Ultra. I want to update this build but each PogoShell version I try seems to be broken in some way or other.

Anyhow, funnily enough I have been refreshing the EZ Flash IV exit-patched GBA emulator collection which he originally released. This kind of digital archaeology is a fun challenge.

 

[Titney]

Very sorry to hear about Kuwanger. Tangentially related but I dug out an old python script of his for batch converting .gbs (gameboy sound files) to .gb files playable on a gameboy. Might be something to add to an archive:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/play-gbs-music-files-on-a-game-boy.375121/post-9215576

 

[DanTheManMS]

Oh wow. I didn't realize that's why his domain name expired. Kuwanger was a great person. RIP dude.

I never really used Pogoshell all that much myself, but the Pogoshell plugin system was cool and I was happy to have helped him test Plugin2GBA over at the PocketHeaven forums. Since the Archive.org link to his website has already been linked and you can download Plugin2GBA from there, here's a collection of some of the plugins I collected over the years. They should be the original .zip files unmodified, as I had a habit of saving anything and everything at the time.

 

[Sterophonick]

Oh wow. I didn't realize that's why his domain name expired. Kuwanger was a great person. RIP dude.

I never really used Pogoshell all that much myself, but the Pogoshell plugin system was cool and I was happy to have helped him test Plugin2GBA over at the PocketHeaven forums. Since the Archive.org link to his website has already been linked and you can download Plugin2GBA from there, here's a collection of some of the plugins I collected over the years. They should be the original .zip files unmodified, as I had a habit of saving anything and everything at the time.

Random fact, I actually had the ones here by Moonlight packaged as part of my kernel, nice to see someone else in the wild just mention them!

On the topic, I recall Moonlight's "ps2_ChangePogoShellReset.exe" mentioning something called "ps2gmv." I haven't been able to locate any evidence of the existence of this plugin. but I imagine it was some kind of video player, but the only things I can find on the "GMV" file format are TAS playbacks for the Gens emulator. Curious if you know anything about this?

(It doesn't quite render correctly in Wine set to the Japanese locale.)

 

[DanTheManMS]

Unfortunately no, I'm not familiar with the GMV format or plugin to play it.

 

[metroid maniac]

Got any instructions on how this can be compiled? This codebase seems pretty ancient - predating GCC triplets even.

 

[FAST6191]

4 main options, plus whatever devkitpro/devkitarm/libagb version differences might cause grief, for the GBA

armsdt. ARM's own assembler, used for a few things and has some options that baseline assemblers (be they GCC's efforts or something like goldroad) lack which made porting things more annoying. Saw it in a few emulators but doubt it is the case here.

visualham.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GBA_Development/HAM_IDE for a start, not sure what to point at these days.

agb toolchains. Nintendo's efforts that were variously leaked as part of various SDKs. Used mostly early on but that would snag a few of these possibly.

devkitpro/devkitarm.


http://www.devrs.com/gba/software.php#ccomp has a bit more.

 

[Sterophonick]

I believe PogoShell was compiled initially using DevKit Advance on GCC 3

 

[metroid maniac]

None of the mentioned toolchains have the exact tool names the makefile is looking for - specifically, it wants arm-elf-* tools while devkitadv provides arm-agb-elf-* tools, HAM provides arm-thumb-elf-, and devkitarm obviously provides arm-none-eabi-* tools.

Of course this is easy to patch around, just change the name in the Makefile, but it indicates that the toolchain is not the expected one. And compiling under any of these toolchains, you get an overflowing of error messages. For example, devkitadv release 4 on GCC 3.1 seems to compile this garbage instruction which can't be assembled, a bug which seems to have been fixed in GCC 3.2

arm-agb-elf-gcc -c  -Wall -c -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-builtin -mthumb -mthumb-interwork -Wall -g -Os -nostdinc -I../libpogo/include users.c -o users.o
/tmp/ccgyampd.s: Assembler messages:
/tmp/ccgyampd.s:120: Error: lo register required -- `str r0,[r2,sp]'
/tmp/ccgyampd.s:259: Error: lo register required -- `str r2,[r1,sp]`

I'll continue digging to see if I can get it to build successfully. If anyone else has been able to do that, it would be an immense help.

Pogoshell looks light in terms of dependencies, at least. I don't think libagb or anything like that will be an issue.