Firmware v0.1.7 preview – Update
Here’s another preview: v0.1.7 preview 2
It addresses some issues reported with v0.1.7 preview (and some others).
- Satellaview works again. BSX alters the original interrupt vectors at run time. The original interrupt vectors are now saved per hook call, not only once when loading the ROM.
- In game buttons now work with MSU1, too.
- Automatic hook method choosing: NMI is default but switched to IRQ when no NMIs are triggered. If both occur, NMI has priority. This should enable the in-game buttons for games that previously did nothing.
- The hook routine saves some CPU time when auto joypad read is enabled by the game – it will just reuse the result instead of doing its own controller scanning. Also the controller is now only scanned every 8 frames. This helps alleviate some glitches, e.g. Secret of Mana now starts up correctly. There are still some glitches left which can’t be eliminated fully.
- Auto region patching works again without having to delete the sd2snes.cfg.
- BSX now emulates Type 1 memory packs instead of Type 2. Apparently the BSX BIOS is buggy with Type 2 packs when they contain HiROM games that are supposed to be run from PSRAM. So, at least Bomberman works now, and probably others too.
- Fixed BSX PSRAM shadowing for HiROM.
- Files and directories with “hidden” or “system” attributes are now actually hidden from the file browser.
You are the best !
Did your kid is at school ?
That will explain why you are working on sd2snes on september ! 🙂
Thank you so much !
Thanks! Nope, he’s only 10 months old xD
But I was sick for most of the last two weeks so I had some time for coding. 😀
Big Birthdayparty in two month near Hannover 😀
Indeed – actually his birthday is three days before mine 😀
awesome… still happy i can rest in my couch ^^
Isn’t it possible to make a listing of all errors from this preview update, or do you refer to the site of Krikkz and make there an update
of all the different errors or hick-ups…
After this what’s the next fase?
SA-1 or FX?
Cheers from Belgium
Following Game stuck on the “Human Entertainment Logo” (Endless Loop) with activated in game buttons.
Firemen, The (E)
Firemen, The (J)
Great work Ikari! There was a slight glitch with the first preview release on Super Mario World where playing two player the second player controllers d-pad wouldn’t work, but this latest update fixed that! Keep up the great work!
Donkey Kong Country 2: First Level will start loading or will load, but crashes. Can reset the game or go back to SD2SNES menu.
Donkey Kong Country 3: Crashes in the save point after dialogue part 3 appears. Ends up with a weird snow screen… ( http://youtu.be/yni3xsNoGac ) and reset fails to fix. Must exit back to SD2NES and boot again.
Still not able to boot BS games. Can someone tell me the checksum of the BS BIOS ROM I need? Can’t seem to find the right one…
Both DKCs work fine for me on a number of consoles so the cause is probably something else… Maybe a bad ROM, bad file system/card, RAM or a connection problem of some sort?
Here are some valid MD5 sums for working ROMs:
DKC2:
6ff526f388a179ec6eba9907eb8e3254
f39d026f5bb47b1e8c72b36dca524849
2ae8161cb714f2dad38f845674553a4b
98458530599b9dff8a7414a7f20b777a
d323e6bb4ccc85fd7b416f58350bc1a2
DKC3:
fc3333af2f93d7dd0a4190a01d49a69e
120abf304f0c40fe059f6a192ed4f947
BSX BIOS:
fed4d8242cfbed61343d53d48432aced bsxbios.bin (unpatched Japanese ROM)
Thanks for the checksums, although I’m having issues trying to find the BSX ROM. I see that Stone Age Gamer has the bsxbios.bin file on their SD2SNES page, so I’ll try that one. I’ll do a MD5 on the ROMs I have. Donkey Kong Country 1 is Revision A (v1.1)… and that one has some bugs that Rareware didn’t fix until Revision B so I’ve been busy exploiting them 😉 I’ll try reinserting the SD2SNES (I got the board only so it has no casing), but as soon as I killed the In-Game Routines most issues went away (on the… Read more »
Hi ikari. Thanks for your work. heres 2 games that have problems with the in game functions enabled.
Hagane: The Final Conflict:
you can’t control the character properly and the hud has visual glitches
Earthbound:
there is visual glitches when in battle
sorry i’m asking it here, but can someone point me out to the right Bios files to play BSX games?
i still haven’t figured it out
Use the ones listed here. Dont worry about the firmware files, they are old ones. http://www.stoneagegamer.com/sd2snes-board-only.html
Super punchout doesn’t work anymore. Anyone else having this problem?
I have a pal snes.
Same here, fails the installed copier check
Yeah, it had been reported before – Super Punchout checks the vectors themselves, can’t be helped. Apparently it only does so on bootup, so temporarily disabling the ingame hooks with L+R+Start+X should do the trick.
Okay! I got BS-X working and everything is closed for strange reason. Maybe the clock is too far in the future and the BS-X BIOS thinks its obsolete? The BIOS I am using is Stone Age Gamers, and it has been modded by someone called LuigiBlood. I can enter a Celebrity House and it offers two programs to load, one is for 1:01 AM and the other crashes when loading the program (or is it just writing the data to “cartridge”?) Tried to load a BS ROM and it said Memory Pak error 09 as seen here: http://pic.twitter.com/ZeKaMC9rrA . the… Read more »
Well – thank you very much for that kind update. Small improvements having quite big influences on the performance. Finally, also the PIC-IGR works very well with games which uses the AJR. However, for the games who don’t use the AJR, I added some kind of a lock to my PIC-IGR code 🙂
Ugh. It may very well be that my Super Famicom is glitching up. I’ve just experienced 6 crashes in a row on Donkey Kong Country 2. Could be the ROM, I’ll try to download it again. The crashes vary from black screen, tileset corruption (sprites are untouched) to random crashes when dying – I died to the lava boss and I collided (while Diddy’s death animation was playing) with the boss’s lava bubbles on the bottom of the level… crash. One time I was in a level and it took me to another level out of the blue, then it… Read more »
I saw your post and I wanted to see if I could replicate the crashes in Donkey Kong Country 2 but I cannot. I have gone through the game and got to world 3 and no crashes. I hope it’s not your Super Famicon, but I didn’t see any of the errors you mentioned. Good luck!
Actually I have an idea about the “new” glitches that are independent of the controller hooks. When I rewrote the memory sharing state machine I took out some aggressive glitch filtering for signals coming from the SNES because I didn’t think it was necessary to keep them. I had another user report a problem with Seiken Densetsu 3 rebooting endlessly in the intro.
@Zarradeth, @Coburn: can you load up Seiken Densetsu 3 and see if it reboots spontaneously?
Siken Densetsu 3 does not reboot on the spot, it loads the intro, then the title and what’s I assume to be a load/save menu ?
SNES Test Program reports FAILED ELECTRONICS TEST now on 0.17pre2. Can you confirm this happens on your SNES? If you get PASS, then I have a faulty unit.
Yeah, the IRQ hook throws off timing a bit which might make the HV count IRQ test fail. There’s a newer test cartridge that actually lists the tests carried out: SNES Burn-In Test Cartridge Rev.D (5. BURN IN TEST)
I bet it’s the HV TIMER test that fails.
So I got the same error with running the SNES Test Program, and the one that Ikari posted I do get the fail for the HV Timer but everything else passes.
My unit passed the first test (complete with the success/APU music) but when I went to run the tests again, it always failed at HV Timer. Is that the Horizontal Vertical Refresh timers?
It would be nice if you later released an optional firmware without the custom routines all together 🙂
They’re nice for testing out different games, maybe cheats and debugging but I’m actually using my sd2snes to play games, old hardcore style. Compatibility is vital.
For example, I’m even using fw1.4a sometimes with BS games for the compatibility.
Like I said multiple times, it will be possible to switch it all off in v0.1.7 final. 😉
Are there regressions in BS support since v0.1.4a?
A lot of games glitch the SD2SNES menu when performing the L+R+SELECT+X reset. Last game I tried was Magical Pop’n and kaboom! I’ll try to post a list after I get done testing.
@Soul2Gazebo
Magical Pop’n uses neither IRQ nor NMI, the controller hook is never called. It’s technically impossible to do an in-game reset using the sd2snes. How did you accomplish it? Does your SNES have another mod (IGR possibly)?
Okay, so I was having the same kind of issues as Coburn was reporting on BS-X games. I would commonly run into “Memory Pak error 09” when loading games. Given that this preview was the first time I had really messed with BS-X stuff I also downgraded to v0.1.5 and tested stuff there. I was using the BS-X stuff from Stone Age Gamer (so same as Coburn). First things first, everything that had issues on v0.1.5 still has issues on v0.1.7, preview 2. I think this is acceptable and not what I am worried about. Just want to say that… Read more »
I found something to do with Memory Pak 09 error is when the BIOS goes to boot the game but the checksum is incorrect. For example, a BS Translated ROM throws that error, while a untouched one worked fine. Might be a trigger in case the download failed from Satellite sources and the SNES was loading garbage data.
Indeed – the sd2snes does not fix the memory pack data checksums. So if data is changed by a translation patch then it would also be the translation patch’s responsibility to fix the checksums. Otherwise the BSX BIOS will fail with Error 09.
Phew, thanks for your feedback everyone… struggling to find explanations now. 😯
Compatibility with the controller/WRAM cheat hooks varies as expected which is why you will be able to disable it entirely in the final. At this point it should actually be more compatible than the Pro Action Replay 3 😀
Garbled menu however – not so cool.
If a lot of games are exhibiting problems with the hooks active right at the outset would a built in delay be feasible so they don’t activate until after the game starts?
+1
Is it possible Ikari ?
I mean do you think it’s a good idea ?
Just a little delay, maybe 5 secondes ?
It would be possible, but it’s just a matter of the game hook routines that might break the games that are “booted”. From what I understand, the routines are run at game boot time, which polls various registers to check what method to use. What I’m saying is that if the routines start in the middle of a game’s loading operation, then it could cause a CPU jam and stuff catches on fire.
It will be the same delay as the “temporarily disable hooks” function, so around 10 seconds at the moment. There are no special technical ramifications of enabling the hooks mid-game that I haven’t taken care of already (mainly “Do not change the vectors while the CPU is reading them”)
Of course if a game doesn’t work with the hooks it will obviously exhibit problems after those 10 seconds.
I’m dying to play with my expensive sd2snes that I have not been able to play with because of no game genie support. Is it possible we should see this in the near future? Like Spring 2015?
The absence of cheats keeps you from playing? 😉
This update seems very “formidable” at this point. Hopeful that you can pull this off.
Hmm… Another random crash, this time in Mario All-stars. The bottom HUD was offset like 16pixels down and off to the right by 75%. I think the SD2SNES interrupted a screen update cycle. Level I was in is World 2-5.
ROM is a clean dump; no patches. Game ran fine for like 15 minutes so it could have been a deep moment.
Have you tried it in another SNES or Super Famicon? I would do that first and if the errors keep showing up than you might want to contact Krikzz, he is the one that makes the physical SD2SNES board to see if he thinks it may have anything to do with the SD2SNES hardware itself.
Unfortunately I do not have the funds to get another Super Famicom or SNES. If I did, I would consider a SNESJr…
I was playing DKC1 last night and had no issues… I think it might have just been a interruptwd redraw cycle. 0.16 works fine, though.
So downgrading the firmware has fixed some of your issues? My Girlfriend and I are playing through DKC 1 and there have been no issues (on 0.1.7 preview 2), we are on Gorilla Glacier. I guess your Super Famicon doesn’t like playing with the IGR tweaks that were added.
I still think this applies, there’ll be a 3rd preview with the input filtering reintegrated shortly.
2 random crash :
– final fight 3 : we were 2 playing on it when suddenly, the game reboot to sd2snes menu
– super metroid : suddenly (just before save point) the game freeze, music was playing, actionning button making the HUD disappear or be transparent…
– Turtles in time
2 players, random freeze on player select
freeze during level 2
🙂
Awesome! Now we never have to get up from the couch ever again! 😀 Thank you so much!
+1
Hmm… Secret of Mana 2 seems to suffer problems, game resetting when dialog is supposed to open. Quite annoying if it happens just after a bossfight! xD Everything seemed to work fine for quite some time until the glitch appeared. Restarting the game –> first merchant –> random reset again.
Hey!
First of all, loving my SD2SNES!!! Pretty sweet. I did notice however, when playing Capt Commando on this version of the firmware, I got graphical glitching in the top and bottom of the screen. I also got flickering when “running” in the game. This did not occur when playing on 1.6.
Thought I would give you a heads up.
Looking forward to the release!
Hello Everyone,
I’m following the updates for SD2SNES since a moment now and i got to say i feel a bit lost here. There are so much differents bugs and glitches due to the console electronics , roms or the sd2snes itself that i cannot really decide if i should upgrade right now or wait for a more stable firmware.
Can someone confirm that v0.1.5 is actually the most stable version to play games ?
Thanks a lot for your work Ikari ! Can’t wait to test the “ultimate” firmware!
Keep on working with the community !
Try 0.16. That one is ideal stable ground.
For me auto region is not working anymore.
Have you tried deleting the sd2snes.cfg already?
I think he mean the auto-region set from the SCIC/uIGR and not the region patching. Of course it cannot work because the SCIC-key and -lock do not run in pairmode…
I have formated already the whole sdcard.
Somehow it is also not working on 0.1.6 and 0.1.5.
I set the Region to Yellow with L+R+SELECT+B. Restart the SNES and start a NTSC game. The game starts with borders.
This isn’t supposed to work yet as pair mode is not enabled yet.
Pling… now I remember. I was using borti4938’s modified 0.1.6d firmware before testing 0.1.7.
I think the auto Hz switching was working on the modified firmware. But maybe I am just confused 🙂
Sailor Moon – Another Story with the English Translation by FuSoYa patch has top line glitching in battles. It acts kinda like a CPU meter actually, but the battle plays out fine without any sprites or the special attacks causing derps. Over world map screen is fine.