#121710 - thegamefreak0134 - Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:00 am
I purchased recently a SuperCard SD adapter (with rumble, whoopie) for my GBA/DS, and I've been having trouble with it since it came out of the box. First of all, it has no GBA support. Second of all, it appears to have no libfat support, as every file-system requiring homebrew I've tried has failed to load. (Dual white screens.) Is anyone else having the same issues? Mainly I just want to get moonshell running...
-thegamefreak
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#121733 - GrizzlyAdams - Wed Mar 14, 2007 12:17 pm
You are right that the rumble cards do not support gba homebrew. It is because of the lack of ram in the cart. the dual white screens is likely because you are using .nds homebrew when the menusystem on the supercards works much better with .sc.nds (which are .ds.gba renamed) files which include a bootstrap. some newer .nds files include a bootstrap as well but if the author adds logos then the bootstrap is left out by ndstool.
#121755 - dantheman - Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:41 pm
I've actually been trying to figure something out there. To my knowledge, regular Supercards work better with .ds.gba files since they copy the files to RAM and launch them, running them like GBA binaries. However, does this still apply on the Supercard Rumble series that lack RAM? Are renamed .ds.gba files still the best ones to use?
#121759 - Dan2552 - Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:54 pm
| dantheman wrote: |
| I've actually been trying to figure something out there. To my knowledge, regular Supercards work better with .ds.gba files since they copy the files to RAM and launch them, running them like GBA binaries. However, does this still apply on the Supercard Rumble series that lack RAM? Are renamed .ds.gba files still the best ones to use? |
I'd have thought they'd help in some way or another, just a guess though.
Try launching homebrew through moonshell. (moonshell defiently works with SC:R btw)
#121841 - thegamefreak0134 - Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:38 am
Ah, there's the rub. I can't get moonshell to run. I've been trying to do just that very thing. I will try running a flashcart version of sorts. Will the homebrew still be able to load up things from the SD card that way?
Let me go ahead and try some stuff out, and I'll get back to you. If you have a moonshell binary that will run already on the "SC:R", I would greatly appreciate it. (You can send it to me at my email: thegamefreak0134@yahoo.com)
Thanks for the info. Wish me luck.
-thegamefreak
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#121844 - thegamefreak0134 - Thu Mar 15, 2007 7:40 am
[gasp]
kk, I got moonshell v 1.6 to load. Odd.. Anywho (I was using 1.7) I am going to play with moonshell to see if I can get my stuff to run from it. I'll report back with any problems I have. Oh, and I have a quick question: Does defragmenting a drive = formatting and re-copying files? Just asking.
-thegamefreak
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#121849 - OOPMan - Thu Mar 15, 2007 8:10 am
For SD media, that works best.
With actual hard drives, you'd probably rather use a defragging tool.
SD cards, though, are usually much smaller and have a finite number of read/write cycles, so you don't want to use a defragging tool on them, as it's wasteful of R/W cycles...
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#121990 - thegamefreak0134 - Fri Mar 16, 2007 6:19 am
Actually, I'm not even using a real SD card. I'm using an SDmicro card in an adapter. Works just the same, so that's not terribly important.
Anywho, I was not able to get moonshell 1.6 to boot gba homebrew. (It booted nds homebrew fine) Do I need a special plugin for this? It said something to the effect of the .gba extension not being supported. (it opened them as text files when I used the .bin extension.)
I was able to get it to do everything else just fine. I actually let my friend borrow it so he could watch FFVII Advent Children, which was just totally awesome. ^_^
-thegamefreak
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#121994 - Firon - Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:21 am
If it's .ds.gba, you need to rename it to .nds probably. If it's actual GBA homebrew, then you need to boot into GBA mode.
#122000 - wintermute - Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:16 am
| Firon wrote: |
| If it's .ds.gba, you need to rename it to .nds probably. If it's actual GBA homebrew, then you need to boot into GBA mode. |
ds.gba runs from GBA cart space, it was intended for flashing to old style GBA carts with software that insisted on "fixing" the header.
Neither ds.gba nds homebrew nor cart based GBA homebrew will work on the Supercard Rumble - it has no onboard RAM. The built in firmware on the SC rumble also cannot boot applications built with devkitARM r20 and later.
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#122143 - thegamefreak0134 - Sat Mar 17, 2007 9:13 am
Well darn then. So I'm basically stuck with trying to get SD card based stuff to work then. Or using my actual flashcart for gba based stuff. Still bites a little to have to keep them separate though...
I did notice some things however. Apparently moonshell is really good about battery life. It costs more energy to run stuff from the GBA slot, correct? Regardless, I had moonshell in my pocket all day long (a day for the DS lasting from noon until about 2:15 this morning because I closed late at work) acting as a fancy mp3 player. This totally rocks first of all because it has a shuffle mode similar to winamp (and unlike my "real" mp3 player) that is actually different each time through, and that makes sure to play every song once before repeating things. Nice.
The best part? After all of this, my DSlite is not even near the red light. I know from experience that a PSP doing all of this would have died long before. I'm actually still running off of batteries at the moment.
Anywho, I did the only logical thing I could think of to do next. I ripped my FFVII Advent Children DVD to a movie, converted it to a .dpg file, and had it playing on my DS. I'm currently playing around trying to get batchDPG to encode it at the proper 30 fps instead of 15. I could only get it to do this by altering its bitrate to a higher level, so I ended up using a target bitrate of 384 and a max bitrate of 500, just to be safe. When I played this on my DS, the video was choppy for a different reason. It would play a second or two beautifully, and then stop, and then pick up later. It would seem as though this was because the DS wasn't able to read (or process) the data fast enough. I suspect though that this might have just been my microSD card being slower than a proper SD card. Does anyone know the approxinate bitrate cap on dpg movies in v 1.6, so I know what to shoot for? (If it's really high then I'll go buy a better card)
Thanks.
-thegamefreak
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#122198 - dantheman - Sat Mar 17, 2007 8:46 pm
I'm pretty sure the limitation is due to the DS, not the card. As far as I know, microSD cards are actually usually faster than SD and miniSD cards.
And yeah, that's way too high of a bitrate for the DS to handle at 30 fps at fullscreen. I don't have exact figures memorized, but I think Firon mentioned at another board that you could get 20 fps fullscreen with a bitrate of about 256, though if you decrease the screen size you can increase the fps to 24. I'm not really sure why you had to increase the bitrate in order to increase the fps. In the version I'm using, all you have to do is select the word "auto" and replace it with the fps of your choice.
Also keep in mind that Moonshell 1.7 increased the DPG playback speed, so since you're using 1.6 you should probably make those figures lower in order to reduce skipping.
#122270 - thegamefreak0134 - Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:02 am
Wow. I realized what my problem was. I had clicked "add" before changing the FPS from auto, which caused it to do 15 fps again. I managed to get it to do 25 fps smoothly with a bitrate of 256 exact (setting the max to 256 as well) easily enough. Of course getting moonshell 1.7 to run would be a great benefit anyway. I should try that and see if I can again...
I'm amazed at this point that the DS can do it at all though. Oh, and I finally killed it today acting as an MP3 player again. Took me two days mind you. That's good news about the micro cards being faster. I was actually going to go buy another card. And now that I think about it, I've been able to play way higher bitrate stuff off the card on my computer, so I see your point.
I'm happy now. ^_^ See?
-thegamefreak
*EDIT* I've noticed that the fog, as well as a lot of other gradients, becomes a little... odd. I suppose this is due do converting 24 bit color down to 15 bit color?
And by the way, how exactly do you use the fancy rumble feature on the SD adapter? (As in, which register do you write to?) It doesn't appear to be the same as an actual DS Rumble pak because my real carts apparently don't recognize it.
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#122274 - HyperHacker - Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:50 am
Yes, gradients don't look so good when downscaled to a lower colour depth.
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#122304 - tepples - Sun Mar 18, 2007 3:57 pm
| thegamefreak0134 wrote: |
| *EDIT* I've noticed that the fog, as well as a lot of other gradients, becomes a little... odd. I suppose this is due do converting 24 bit color down to 15 bit color? |
That and the quantization inside the MPEG-1 compression.
| Quote: |
| And by the way, how exactly do you use the fancy rumble feature on the SD adapter? (As in, which register do you write to?) It doesn't appear to be the same as an actual DS Rumble pak because my real carts apparently don't recognize it. |
I think they need to be patched with some sort of Nitro Hax code.
can we lose the yarr stuff please : wm
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