writing a new gdemu menu (opensource) - anyone want to help/work on this?

Neuroacid hasn't been on the site since 2017, and I even emailed him last summer and never got any reply when I asked him if he was planning on releasing any updates, or might make it open sourced. I have been worried something unfortunate might have happened to him.

 

they are the same
comparisons that made MNEMO is utter nonsense

 

well im stuck, i can't nail reading files from the gd-rom drive on hardware.

no clue, even if i could. i also cant launch binaries so.... help?

latest pushed master is what i have too.

 

I'm definitely interested in what comes of this project. Saw your post in the other thread asking about GDMenu themes, and I'm interested in what comes of theming for this new app. GDMenu is nice but I always want mods that look stock.

 

I always wondered if something similar to the Dream On Demo disc GUI could be used. People made some bad ass compilation discs of like all the different versions of DOA2, and it was really something to see with great graphics.



This is the kind of stuff I would like to see done! Then we can have a GUI that holds up to a modded OG Xbox for instance.



There is even a project somebody worked on over at GitHub that allowed you to tweak this GUI image pretty in depth.

https://github.com/arthabus/DreamcastCdiTool

 

Ok so

Gd-rom reading is worked out.

I still can't display pvr textures (but looking into it tonight) and I still can't launch binaries from another binary (aka booting the game from in the menu).

The good news is everything so far is usable by itself and self contained. So the front-end gui stuff just calls and gets info from the actual program doing the work.

If someone wants to write a fancy gui, that wouldn't be tricky at all.

You could even use kallistios (and maybe simulant?).

Always up for help too!

 

If I knew how to code my way out of a wet paper bag I would help out lol. I am only a modder on PC games and that is about as far as my code tweaking knowledge goes. Not able to write much code at all. You can see the extent of my knowledge from my BF2 mods like in my sig.

So do you think that DreamOn demo disc front end could potentially work with something like this? Could the code be tweaked to use that as a frontend basically is what I am asking.

 

Isn't @BlueCrab PSO boot cd open source? It could be valuable to figure out some stuff to boot other binaries.

 

I used that and reversed his protections he had in place. I don't get why it's such a damn mystery to read files from a gd-rom. The piracy argument is so invalid it's incredible.

Anyways.

Progress this evening:
Sorted out PVR loading, so now you can display the disc image (0GDTEX.PVR) or I guess any image you wanted.

I actually ran into a barrier with gd-rom reading but it should be sorted soon.

Launching binaries still fails miserably, no idea what to do about it .

 

I'm able to read some data off a GD-ROM after booting mine and switching to it.

Access seems to freeze right at exactly 2MB (2*1024*1024 bytes). I think I remember you talking about that previously .I think you also dropped some code I tossed into neoIP.

Is this the same issue I was having then? Something about HOLLY locking gd-rom drive I think, right?

 

Current progress, and current on gitlab too

Context:

• Booted as a CDI
• Chain loaded away from default boot location (0x8C010000 -> 0x8CE00000)
• Bottom right image is 0GDTEX.PVR from the menu
• Swapped to Spiderman GDI dump
• Hit Next, but haven't started the loading procedures

Works exactly the same on my console+GDEmu
(Except next and prev do control what image will be selected)

Easier build command now

Code:

cd openMenu
make clean; make scramble

And binary will be 1ST_READ.BIN in /build/. Scrambled and ready to use.

 

I have heard somebody say that the HOLLY protection is the last great thing left to crack. They said if that was broken, we could run games from the IDE mod without bios mods, but I don't know how much truth there is to that. I saw this not too long ago on a comment on a YouTube video I forgot.

 

Intrested in this project.
Nice to see people still working on Deunan ODE improvement

 

You should avoid KOS if possible, since it doesn't boot games cleanly. Games such as PSO don't work properly if you boot them with a KOS loader, or any loader that messes with the hardware too much before passing control to the game. BlueCrab's non-KOS approach with the 2.0 boot disc should, in theory, be safe for all Katana games. PSO is happy with it, at least. (Earlier boot disc releases used KOS and broke PSO, and it was easier to just rewrite the boot disc without KOS than to figure out what KOS is doing wrong.)

 

@Mrneo240
1) libtsunami is bad idea for build menu
2) need patch KOS for load 0GDTEX.PVR from GDI
3) for start game need use standart BIOS function

make the menu on SDL, with the rest I will help

 

I wouldn't exactly call it "protection" just a little tiny game of obfuscation. Frankly, the fact that nobody's really tried to figure it out since I released that loader in the first place proves that pretty much nobody has had any need to read GD-ROMs from homebrew (or that it's just as easy to use other means like making the default KOS code do it).

That said, it was one of the old unspoken rules of Dreamcast homebrew to not show how to read GD-ROMs -- both for piracy reasons and out of respect for Sega. Those of us that have been around for a long time just stick to that rule because there's really not much of a good reason not to do so. Those that haven't been around a long time obviously haven't had much need to read the high density areas of GD-ROMs, considering the lack of code out there to do it.

As the one that maintains KOS to this day, I stick to the old rules with it and all of my code.

Also, just to chime in on the discussion at hand -- as @Aleron Ives already said up there, I'd highly recommend against using KOS (and thus libtsunami or SDL) for doing any sort of menuing or anything else -- you will end up breaking some games (well, at least PSO) unless you want to spend a long time figuring out what extra cleanup you'll need to do to make it work. That's why, as was already stated, the PSO Patcher itself doesn't use KOS -- it's more work to figure out why things break with it than it was worth.

 

I tried to just load fill IP.bin to 0x8c008000 and 1st_read (or whatever binary) to 0x8c010000 and just jump to bootstrap 1 of IP.bin (skip license screen) at 0x8c008b00 but issues launching stuff.

The menu front-end could be changed. I guess for now I can go super basic framebuffer. All the actual logic is separated out from the front end.

Gd-rom driver is working but seems to get locked at exactly 2MB. Thank you blue for providing easy to read asm and such, very helpful.

It could load the 0gdtex I just didn't set that up.

Also the odd thing is, that the original GDMenu does use kos, but also has an 8kb loader binary that I guess handles the actual launching .(files ripped from it, posted here)

 

@Mrneo240 this what you need?
https://assemblergames.com/threads/...t-echelon-or-binhack.68624/page-4#post-966262

 

And people have reported in the past that the original GDMenu breaks PSO when playing online. I don't know if the issue was ever fixed, but I know I've had reports that it was broken.

 

Last I heard, GDMenu was partially fixed. The original version caused serious problems, e.g. not being able to target other players or use Rafoie at all, and being able to walk through some solid objects. To my knowledge the current version has fixed that, but Battle mode is still broken (instant time up). I don't think anybody has found a way to fix that without ditching KOS.