Hacking New Theme for EZ-Flash Omega!

[Sterophonick]

Hello all!

I have been working on a new theme for the EZ-Flash Omega, and I call it Simple.

It is a nice rounded theme with both light and dark options, and allows for way more functionality on your Game Boy Advance!

Its features are:

PogoShell plugin support
A handful of plugins are included which means you can launch way more emulators and file types such as text documents, images, and music.

Save backup feature
When enabled, this will make up to five backups of the save file belonging to the ROM/file you are opening.

Better English translation
Just better in general

Cleaner sans-serif font

An option to hard reset the console when booting a GBA game without holding L.
I implemented this because I know some people like me like having the BIOS intro screen.

In short, it doesn't just look pretty, it gives your cartridge way more functionality as well!

Hope everyone likes it!

Latest version: v3.7
Latest version (DE): v1.3

Credits:
Kuwanger (PogoShell modifications)
Sasq (Creating PogoShell and a few plugins)
Veikkos (Save backup code and Goomba Color mods)
CoolHJ (Improving Chinese translation)
Moonlight (Various PogoShell plugins)
RibShark (Technical Assistance)

Greetz:
DarkFader
Let's Emu!
Krom
Simon Band

DEFINITIVE EDITION USERS:
DOWNLOAD SimpleDE.zip FOR YOUR CARTRIDGE.
OTHERWISE DOWNLOAD Simple.zip!
ALSO YOU MUST USE THE OFFICIAL KERNEL TO UPDATE THE FIRMWARE; THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO THE BASE OMEGA

READ THE INCLUDED TEXT DOCUMENT BEFORE ASKING QUESTIONS!

Screenshots:

Source: https://github.com/Sterophonick/SimpleLight
Source (Definitive Edition): https://github.com/Sterophonick/omega-de-kernel
Manual: https://sterophonick.github.io/omegamanual.html


Skinning guide:
https://sterophonick.github.io/pages/projects/howtoskinsimple.html

 

[Sterophonick]

Update 1.4:
Made the GBA force hard reset when you launch a game from PSRAM.
Altered the colors a bit.
Fixed a few strings
Fixed the text for loading a game not being visible.
Fixed the blue bar on the right of the icons.
Reduced battery usage in some areas of the menus.

 

[Sterophonick]

Update 1.5:
A few text fixes, and a few color tweaks.

 

[Sterophonick]

Update 1.6:
This is a biggie update

Changes and additions:
Merged Kuwanger's Pogoshell Addon for the Omega, also comes preloaded with a bunch of plugins.
Text fixes
Changed the location of the system folders, into one big folder, called SYSTEM.
Extra icons for Emulated ROMs and files that have working PogoShell plugins.

Installation:
Create a folder called SYSTEM.
Move the following folders into there.
RTS, SAVER, IMGS, CHEAT, PATCH
Also copy the PLUG folder in the zip file to the SYSTEM folder.
Install the kernel as usual.

This package comes with the following plugins:
The ModPlayer plugin (.mod)
The JPEG plugin (.jpg .jpeg)
The BMP plugin (.bmp)
SMSAdvance (.sms .gg .sg)
ZXAdvance (.z80 .sna)
PCEAdvance (.pce)
SwanAdvance (.ws .wsc)
MSXAdvance (.rom)
Wasabi (.sv)
NGPAdvance (.ngp .ngc .ngpc)

Note: MSXAdvance comes with the C-BIOS.

 

[Deleted User]

Just got my omega today, and man is it awesome. However, i stumbled upon a fatal bug in your custom kernel. When a rom is written to NOR the omega will crash. I tried my own slight mod of the original kernel it worked fine. Thanks for this amazing update though.

 

[Sterophonick]

Just got my omega today, and man is it awesome. However, i stumbled upon a fatal bug in your custom kernel. When a rom is written to NOR the omega will crash. I tried my own slight mod of the original kernel it worked fine. Thanks for this amazing update though.

Strange. It works fine here.

 

[Deleted User]

Again, the stock kernel works fine and yet yours locks up.

 

[Sterophonick]

Try this one.

 

[Deleted User]

Try this one.

Nope. Still crashing.

 

[Sterophonick]

I got nothing, I tested it and it works fine for me.

 

[kuwanger]

What ROM (with md5) are you writing to NOR, with what settings, and Write to NOR Clean or Write to NOR Addons?

Edit - Also, Sterophonick would you mind including the source for your fork of my fork of the ez omega kernel? If it's on your gitlab page, I didn't see it.

 

[Deleted User]

This is not rom dependent, I have tried several roms and the kernel locks up just before writing the rom to NOR. This happens with both Clean and With Addons. The strange thing is the NOR Flash works fine when I am using the stock kernel from the ezflash website.

Also, https://gitlab.com/Sterophonick/omega-kernel

Edit: Ok, so it turns out it's not crashing like I thought it was. I was getting confused because for whatever reason the progress indicator is not showing on the bottom of the screen like it should.

 

[kuwanger]

Thanks for the link. In any case, I found one bug (I don't think it's related). Line 1129 in ezkernel.c should be "page+=0x800;" The reason I made the change is because while nominally ROMs are loaded in 128KB blocks and page switches can occur at the maximum 8MB blocks the EZ Omega supports, if you're using an emulator that's not a multiple of 128KB (which is the norm), you could get into the situation where a 128KB block write would extend past the 8MB range (cutting off the end) and leaving a whole at the start of the next 8MB page. If you instead increment in 4MB pages (ie 0x800), you'll never run into that issue.

Edit - I should probably throw in that the documentation the !*IMPORTANT!*.TXT is incorrect that .mb does a hard reset. It'd be nice if that were a doable thing. By the same token, it'd be neat if you supported .mb and .mbz files natively. Of course, that's really a feature request.

 

[Deleted User]

So, to clarify, it is NOT crashing. The progress indication text is just blank after the "Checking Save Data..." text with the left edge of the C showing.


Also, I hate to be that one guy, but I would prefer not having the psram hard reset. Would you mind telling me what needs to be changed in the source code to disable it?

 

[Sterophonick]

Every time that you see SetRompageWithHardReset(0x200,1), change it to SetRompageWithHardReset(0x200,key_L);

 

[Deleted User]

Thanks! I hope it's possible to fix the text bug.

Edit: I was able to fix progress text "bug". It turns out you didn't compensate for the change from white text to black text with the NOR writing text. Also, the edge of the "C" is because of a difference in the width of the new font. I was able to tweak a few things and now everything looks fine. I also hid the prompt for the NOR format (when it starts) so the progress display doesn't overlap it.

 

[Sterophonick]

Update 2.0:
Some redesign, added a new menu when you hit select, (though all you can do with it currently is toggle thumbnails), and fixed a few text bugs, like the NOR writing issue.

 

[kuwanger]

After a lot of fiddling, I've created a new version of reset_ez4.s for the EZ Omega. The major difference is simply waiting ~5 seconds before actually doing the reset. This is important because one of the last things pocketnes, goomba, etc does is save menu settings to the SRAM, and that could lead to corruption. The solution the EZ Omega kernel does is to simply NOP out the writeconfig(), but that has the unfortunately side-effect of settings not being saved. And it still leaves users to wait the necessary time to not cause corruption.

The reason it took me so long with fiddling is because later versions of pocketnes include built in code to do resetting for Visoly, EZ, G6, and M3 carts (there might be more). So, it turns out you need to do the waiting before issuing those magic writes (AFAIK all the relevant code is in EXWRAM/IWRAM so it's not that), so I ended up having to reorder the function calls. The oddity to me most of all is that it froze. *shrug*

Anyways, here's the new binary and source. It only takes 16 more bytes to actually do the wait so it should fit with all the other patched plugins. I hope you find this useful.

Edit: Patching Goomba Paletted is also a little more complicated because it supports ez4 reset built in. So, I just overwrote the last 16 bytes before the return address in visoly's init_flashcart function since that's really otherwise pretty much a dummy function.

 

[mitch200584]

So does this firmware allow for SMS & GG games to be played natively?

 

[Sterophonick]

If you have the SYSTEM folder set up, yes.