#38448 - lambi1982 - Mon Mar 28, 2005 12:14 am
This is cool for anyone who owns a GBA Movie player. On the companies main site www.movieadvance.com it says that they are working on a firmware update strictly for the DS. They have no other details on it but it would be cool to see DS full screen video, MPEG 4 or Divx codecs, touch screen controls and Hold the DS sideways (double screen) wide screen.
Post any other ideas of thought of this.
PocketSNES anyone?
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#38451 - darkfader - Mon Mar 28, 2005 12:32 am
Possibly a bit better display on DS because of color characteristics. And perhaps support for more formats. Don't get too excited :)
Although I am wondering... many seem to claim to be able to run DS software from GBA card.
#38463 - TJ - Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:25 am
There is no way they could make it operate as a DS game just with a simple firmware upgrade. It is much more complicated than that.
#38481 - Lynx - Mon Mar 28, 2005 10:31 am
Well.. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.. But, if they are able to pull off ANYTHING that is DS related using just a firmware upgrade, it will show that DS hardware can be used by just a GBA cart with a "DS enabled" bootloader. If that's the case, we'd just need to reverse that bootloader and everyone would be set!
#38505 - taichi - Mon Mar 28, 2005 5:35 pm
h?h? ^^ widescreen? if you hold the ds so, you get a lot of headache ^^
#38507 - The V Man - Mon Mar 28, 2005 5:39 pm
Sounds like a really cool idea. I love the PlayYan and can't wait for a NA release, but the idea that it'll be limited to the GBA slot kinda sucks. I was hoping for some DS enabled extras like touch screen play controls and such.
Maybe they'll rethink it and after the initial release, do a DS version?
Probably not but it'd be cool.
#38535 - lambi1982 - Mon Mar 28, 2005 11:13 pm
Well, it may be some really cool updates or just the addition of stereo sound, who knows.
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#38657 - Sebbo - Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:45 am
i've managed to break the latest firmware upgrade into its ARM7 and THUMB opcodes, and i'm getting alot of commands that aren't recognisable in either, in particular the first couple of lines
#38662 - tepples - Wed Mar 30, 2005 1:28 am
The first 192 bytes are not supposed to be instructions; they're the header, and the ARM jump instruction skips over them. In addition, have you looked at those portions you speak of with a tile editor? They might be tile data.
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#38685 - Sebbo - Wed Mar 30, 2005 10:15 am
point me in the direction of one and i'll run it through
there's quite a few sections where there's no defined op-code
#38690 - tepples - Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:02 pm
My 8ted tile editor has a GBA mode
http://www.pineight.com/pc/
and so do Tile Molester and a lot of other more recent multisystem tile editors available at zophar.net.
EDIT: Yes, it is useless for mode 3 bitmap editing.
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Last edited by tepples on Sat Apr 02, 2005 6:29 pm; edited 1 time in total
#38966 - lambi1982 - Sat Apr 02, 2005 4:37 pm
What would a DS update be? "We are now working on an update which is for DS mainly" this is what is on the GBA Movie player web site, to me, this sounds like it will use some part of the DS that an SP cannot do.
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#38970 - Dwedit - Sat Apr 02, 2005 6:17 pm
The movie player only contains graphics for the 15-bit video mode, so Tepples's tile viewer is useless here.
If you want to see a full rom dump taken from an actual movie player, get http://home.comcast.net/~alanweiss3/dwedit/files/gbamovieplayer.7z
Change byte 1F7 from 85 to 84 to run it on an emulator.
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#38977 - muckers - Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:51 pm
Nice job, dwedit, but when it's run in an emulator (namely VBA) it gets stuck at the 'This product is not endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo' splash screen.
#38981 - lambi1982 - Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:02 pm
This is awesome news.
I had recently emailed the people at www.Movieadvance.com to mention some ideas of the new updates and this is the email replied back to me (also I will post what I sent):
What I sent to them-
1. PocketSNES or GBA
2. Touch screen controls
3. Full screen ( DS MODE)
4. Side ways ( double screen ) Wide screen
5. Mpeg 4 or Divx codecs
What they sent back- | Quote: |
| Thank you. About what you mentioned, some of them will be available |
Some means more than one, this is awesome...
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#38984 - abigsmurf - Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:30 pm
being a Chinese company it's possible that they've got some info from one of the flashcart makers about how to use DS resources from a GBA cart or possibly it will be used in conjunction with a passme.
I'd say pocketsnes would be unlikely unless they modify the program to address the DS' 4megs of RAM (isn't there too much latency to read the rom directly from the flash card?) and it would prevent you from playing a few of the games which are bigger than 4megs.
the cynic inside me says it will be colour and sound adjustments to slightly improve the picture, maybe some touchscreen functionality.
I do hope they get fullscreen and a compression format that actually offers quality/size above MPEG1 and sort out the sound sync issues though
#38986 - Dwedit - Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:54 pm
Seeing as there is no way to access the DS features from a GBA cartridge alone, and I don't think there's any more room in the 512 bytes bootup page to check for a passme, I doubt there are any DS hardware enchancments in the next version. Maybe just color correction.
Now long file names and FAT32 support, that would be nice.
The freezing at the 'This product is not endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo' splash screen happens on the real thing if no compactflash card is inserted.
As an aside, the device uses such weird boot/copy protection that it's a miracle it even boots at all. Often it fails to boot up. I have no clue why dumps started succeeding after tons of failures where it just repeats the first 512 bytes of each page instead of showing the rest of the content. I noticed that it makes the first 512 bytes of each page to be unimportant junk, probably to prevent useful dumps. But for some reason it just worked one time.
I wonder how hard it would be to find a way to write to rom, find entry points for the existing routines, etc.
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#38993 - tepples - Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:54 pm
GBATEK explains that the GBA BIOS makes a few apparently meaningless reads during the intro:
| Quote: |
| During startup, the BIOS performs some dummy-reads from a stream of pre-defined addresses, even though these reads seem to be meaningless, they might be intended to unlock a read-protection inside of commercial cartridge. There are 16 pre-defined address streams - selected by a 4bit key number - of which the upper two bits are gained from 800009Eh Bit 0-1, and the lower two bits from a checksum across header bytes 09Dh..0B7h (bytewise XORed, divided by 40h). |
Perhaps the unlock sequence is keyed to this.
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#39043 - lambi1982 - Sun Apr 03, 2005 7:19 pm
Anyway to do a rom dump with a CF card inserted?
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#39065 - Dwedit - Mon Apr 04, 2005 2:45 am
That won't make a difference. It does compactflash IO through DMA reads and writes in a certain ROM area. Maybe that explains the odd mirroring where each 16k repeats 8 times before moving on to the next, bloating the dump size to 4MB instead of 512k. Not sure if it has to be DMA or not, but attempting to duplicate those reads and writes with a multiboot program freezes. Maybe my code just sucks.
And the dump WAS made with a CF card inserted.
Also looks like the ROM itself is read via DMA transfers that read from a constant address, rather than incrementing the address. That's why it needs the modification to run in VBA.
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