New Gpadvance Version - V1.48


Wario Land Advance is playable as well and looks great! Unfortunately all the "Loading..." screens makes it a bit annoying.
 
1.44 and 1.45 are available..
but both dont work on my gp32 :)
1.44 gives just a blank screen after i choosed the rom... (even the loading message didnt appear)
1.45 ist just a blank screen for me .. no menu or anything
hope the next releases are better :D
 
1.45 was released a few hours ago. But it seems to have some major bug, it won't even start on my GP32. I can edit the first news post, but unfortunately I am not able to edit the topic name to keep people updated that way.
 
i sadly have to report:

Verison 1.45 doesnt load at all
Version 1.44 gets me into the menu but crashes when i wanna load a rom (gp32 doesnt reset, just shows white screen - this normal or a loooong loading time?)
version 1.43 seems to work

any solutions ?
 
gba-cube posted on Jul 14 2004 at 09:38 AM said:
1.45 works with me.
Maybe they changed it.
PS- diddn´t really noticed some changes tough ;)
maybe its the BIOS....
what BIOS are you using? Im using aqua 5.01 and only whitescreen with 1.45... havent tried 1.44 yet but i'll do so now.
 
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same here. just wait for the next build.

no, it's not the firmware. Torlus said Enf is rewriting the MMU initialization part and it doesn't work too well right now. he said it should be finished by the end of the week, stick to 1.43 until then.
 
ok, thanks for clearing that up.
however, heres a way to get 1.44 working:
before loading any ROM, make "verify MMU" ! After that load a ROM, it will work as always.
 
ok, little update on games:

with 1.43:

- breath of fire (European)- works!!
- Fzero - works but graphics are scrambeld and sloooow
- Yoshis island - shows the group intro and 'nintendo presents' then freezes
- metroid fusion WOOORKS! but incredible anoying loading screens so i didnt make it out of the intro ;)
 
It's a pity the dynamic loading isn't 'intelligent' yet. Because Tony Hawk Underground actually works! But is unplayable because it has to load something from section 0 and section 3 (or any other section) every time you move a pixel. Now if the dynamic loading was intelligent/selflearning it'd know which bits it loaded several times in rapid succesion and it could load those into mem. (High activity ROM parts go into mem, low activity ROM parts go on the SMC). Other then that, looking great ;)

P.S

I tried about 40 games, I think about 15 didn't load at all, another 15 to 20 got at least onto the menu, and 5 to 10 games were actually playable (Well, too slow to call it really playable, but you catch my drift ;))
 
I got Mario Kart to run but it was slooooow and scrambled. If I can play Advance Wars I'll be happy :)

I agree that the Loading message is annoying, perhaps a subtle icon like in Castaway or the word "loading" in place of "nintendo in a nintendo lozenge. (Sorry that's the designer in me speaking, best to leave all that for after it is working...)

®
 
Here are the roms I tried:

Super Mario Advance: hangs
Super Mario Advance 2: hangs
Super Mario Advance 3: starts and hangs
Super Mario Advance 4: starts, UNPLAYABLE slow (loading...)
Mario Kart: starts, graphical errors ingame
Metroid 4: starts, UNPLAYABLE slow (loading...)
Zelda: hangs
Tetris: hangs with debug error
FZero: Starts. graphical errors ingame
Wer wird Millionär: runs perfectly
Lufia: starts and hangs ingame
Golden Sun: starts and hangs
Worms World Party: starts and hangs
Spyro Season Of Ice: hangs
Kirby: starts and hangs with debug error
Need for Speed Underground: starts, graphical errors AND hangs
Sonic: starts and hangs
Street Fighter II Turbo: hangs
Street Fighter Alpha 3: starts and hangs
Wario Land: starts and hangs ingame

I'm sure, that most roms were already mentioned, but I don't have the time to check the whole forum. My parents laws, you understand...

Here some questions:

- For what is this cache?
- Why is it so slow since 1.43?
- Is it possible that only roms </= 4 meg can be loaded fully in RAM? I cut all zeroes off my roms. Now I have Roms with around 4,6 meg (Super Mario Advance 4:). Normally they should fit into RAM?!? But it still says loading... all the time. Perhaps sb should add support for unconventional Rom sizes., too.
- Perhaps sb should add sth like a preloading function, by analyzing the roms outside the GP and doing sth like a config file for every Rom.
 
Emu&Co posted on Jul 14 2004 at 12:47 PM said:
Here some questions:

- For what is this cache?
- Why is it so slow since 1.43?
- Is it possible that only roms </= 4 meg can be loaded fully in RAM? I cut all zeroes off my roms. Now I have Roms with around 4,6 meg (Super Mario Advance 4:). Normally they should fit into RAM?!? But it still says loading... all the time. Perhaps sb should add support for unconventional Rom sizes., too.
- Perhaps sb should add sth like a preloading function, by analyzing the roms outside the GP and doing sth like a config file for every Rom
- Dunno, maybe it saves SRAM in the RAM or something, try saving in Breath of fire (it works sometimes! gotta try it many times!), then turn off gp32 and restart. launch gpadvance and your saved game is still there - it just doesnt load most times. but again, if you're very lucky it even loads that and you can play on. Cool, isnt it?

- Dunno perfectly, but maybe the support of IRQ since 1.43 or MMU rewriting. i bet it will be fixed later!

-Maybe they add a feature that all roms that fit in the RAM *will* be loaded in the RAM, but right now it loads all roms with dynamical loading.

-Well, let the coders do what they want to do first, maybe you want to write enf65 (he responds!) an e-mail with this.
 
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About dynamic loading : it's in a very early stage. It's currently using 1 Mbytes pages, and there's no caching algorithm at all. Please be patient, after all it's a piece of code that is only 3 days old :) Be sure that it will be fixed in a few.

For the current releases : enf65 is performing a MMU initialization rewrite (to make it cleaner, and to properly initialize all ranges of addresses that a GBA might use). Unfortunately, it is not finished, so the current FXE isn't a stable release...
I'll ask him not to commit "unstable" FXEs in the future.
 
Torlus posted on Jul 14 2004 at 12:56 PM said:
Unfortunately, it is not finished, so the current FXE isn't a stable release...
I'll ask him not to commit "unstable" FXEs in the future.
I hope this isnt my fault. :(
I hope we will still see several updates. Its much better that way than throwing out one per year.
 
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brilliant work guys, its amazing to see this concept of MMU being taken so far and i believe we will see real results!

excellent!

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