#16845 - spinner - Wed Feb 25, 2004 9:04 pm
I don't want this to turn into a rant but how in the hell did the F2A people leave out a simple format/erase feature for PowerWriter? They are fleecing their customers, its like leaving out the off button on a state of the art television.
That said, does anyone know how hard it would be to write an app that addressed the entire 1G cart and formated it?
Or, does anyone know of any other tool that does this or if the F2A people have any intentions of adding this "feature" in the forseeable future? By forseeable future I mean yesterday of course.
Unbelievable.
And thank you for any info on this.
#16848 - ampz - Wed Feb 25, 2004 9:27 pm
I'am not really sure why you would need such a feature...
Sure it feels good to be able to click "format" when the cart does not do what you want... But in reality, their software erase anything that needs to be erased before they write anything new to it... and there is no technical reason to erase the entire cart... It's just a waste of time.
While on the subject of the FA Ultra... I'am wondering... Their "realtime save" and "slowmotion" features... Are they any good? From what I understand, they release patches specifically for each game in order to make theese features work? The features only work for a total of 11 games so far, right?
#16849 - spinner - Wed Feb 25, 2004 9:35 pm
Ampz,
The reason one needs a format feature is because the PowerWriter software is not doing its job and remnants of past images are appearing on the card, especially if you don't fully overwrite it. Perhaps this is in part due to the technical hardware failures they reported on their site? Or perhaps its because PowerWriter isn't smart enough to either ignore or erase the space that's left over from your most recent write.
However you want to look at it, the current ineptness of this program demands a format feature to at the very least help make up for all of its other non-working parts.
I have no idea unfortunately about your other question but I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my post.
Spinner
#16859 - ampz - Wed Feb 25, 2004 11:50 pm
Start your favourite hexeditor and make a large file containing only 0xFF. Fill the cart with copies of this file and you are done.
#16868 - tepples - Thu Feb 26, 2004 5:12 am
You can make a constant-filled ROM quickly with the 'padbin' tool included with GBFS. Just watch out that your writer program doesn't automatically size-strip ROMs that end in several kilobytes of constant data before sending them; you may want to do something at the end of the result from 'padbin'.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#16876 - torne - Thu Feb 26, 2004 6:35 am
A repeating pattern might perhaps work better than a constant value, as this is less likely to be stripped by a flashing tool. Setting everything to 0xFF would be great, if not for the fact that it'll still erase each sector before it writes it (thus you are not gaining anything over writing any other non-game patttern).
#16883 - spinner - Thu Feb 26, 2004 9:07 am
Short of writing something, is there a hex editor that lets you fill a file with random hex values?
I tried FF-ing the full 1024 (or 1022 minus the F2A PowerWriter loader) and the cart still thinks it has 4 fantom roms, but it doesn't display their name/header and naturally they cannot be loaded. If I write over this with new roms, these phantoms remain.
Very frustrating.
#16886 - torne - Thu Feb 26, 2004 10:51 am
Sounds like a problem with the loader program itself, not the writer software, tbh. If you have a Unixy system (including Cygwin) you can dd from /dev/zero to get files full of zeros, or from /dev/urandom to get random bytes.
#16906 - spinner - Thu Feb 26, 2004 7:54 pm
I don't have any unix tools like that. I guess I could install Cygwin just for the sake of trying.
If its the loader file itself, and not the writer, what can be done? Is it possible I've got a corrupt loader file? Maybe I can reload it off the CD that came with the F2AUltra.
#16907 - torne - Thu Feb 26, 2004 8:32 pm
I was suspecting that it's just stupid. =)
LittleWriter's loader menu has made phantom roms appear for me once or twice on my XG cart, but every one of those was the result of a failed flash operation (i.e. crashed/locked up part way through) and at least one of the roms that was *supposed* to be on the cart would also be broken.