Small GINGE update

[Hooka]

Hey guys, uploaded a slightly fixed GINGE!

Finally had some time to actually sit down infront of the computer and fix up a few things I knew needed fixing. Hopefully you'll all enjoy a bit better compatibility on the GP2X front.

I also uploaded a pack of iprice's games! Don't have guru logic or Balloonacy working yet, so they're not in there.

If I'm lucky I'll manage to release a few more packs here in the next few days and hopefully figure out a simple way for you guys to select between oldglibc (gp2x fw before 4.x) and wiz modes in ginge (how I get certain games to work in packs that don't just load in ginge normally). Note this doesn't guarantee all games that work will just work after this change, some may still require script modification and other tricks still making the packs an easier option to use. BUT will increase people's ability to just use their GP2X cards plug and play also.

No promises on anything but I'm also hoping to sneak out a wiz release when I can figure out why all input stopped working... caanoo release might follow

Note: certain games are on both wiz/gp2x, please give both versions a try before asking me why one isn't working... at the moment some wiz versions of bennugd/fenix games aren't working properly, going to try and have it sorted soon.

 

[b_o_b]

Awesome! Big fan of ginge, still like to see OutcaST working on my Pandora.

BTW. Your packs are great as well, I think I've installed them all on one of my Pandora's. Looking forward to the new packs - and will give iprice's a try.

[edit] typo

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Nice, thanks.

 

[canseco]

Animatch doesn't have glitches anymore.
My wife says thanks a lot and me too,

 

[Eight Bit]

Animatch doesn't have glitches anymore.

I played it a lot, did it have glitches?
Animatch is a great wizz game, one of the better ones iirc. I sold my Wizz some time ago as most games play fine on my Pandora now

 

[Hooka]

Ok, made a small patch today to fix glouton... didn't change version number or anything for the moment gonna wait till I get some more stuff sorted over the next few days

 

[erico]

A Caanoo release would be nice at some point. I tried running atari link emulator once but it didn´t work. I don´t think a link emu for the Caanoo, so using ginge is probably the way to go.

 

[Hooka]

erico: I'll give compiling a new binary for the caanoo a go here in a few days, unfortunately when I tried getting a new wiz build I was only partially successful... input isn't working :S BUT compatibility was way up

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all

@Hooka : thanks for the updated GINGE and all the new packs !

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[atari_afternoon]

Thanks from me, too and happy weekend to all!

 

[Hooka]

Just another update: been sorting through games like a madman should have some new packs available soon And by that I mean I now have 75 folders of games containing anywhere from 1-20 games each ready to be made into packs after confirming on the system they are still working with my recent changes and getting their pxml and scripts all good Which leads to the next point so I can continue making the pxml's....

Input needed: I'm changing the way I pack the games, gonna make it so names are "Falldown - AlexM (GINGE)" and they show up under the games menu under puzzle, strategy, etc. if that works for everyone? Only doubles will have the creators name after them like in this example. Seeing as GINGE stands for GINGE Is Not GP2X Emu, it doesn't make sense to have all those games under emulator now does it? I'm uploading an updated alexm pack setup like this, please let me know if this works for all of you...

Things that suck: I broke my openwiz support but will hopefully have it working again pretty quick here, when that happens I'm going to either have gmenu2x setup so you can change the default, oldglibc and openwiz there or at the very least give a menu option for each.

Things that are still getting neglected for the second: I might have to look into notaz's changes for getting Pandora controls working again to get the wiz and caanoo versions compiling with controls again, might take a little while. Haven't looked at gmenu2x again yet, but hope to once I've gotten a good chunk of the packs done. gpu940, wiz gl support and other issues are pretty much over my head still but I'll keep looking at it.

Small Victory: Found a way to get certain older stuff to work using a hex editor to trick the game into not deleting itself after extracting, turns out I can just run it on any linux pc and it would extract and delete itself but ginge was clobbering it because it was running it through the script parser. Road Smash now works and should have maybe a handful others working too

 

[levi]

Yes, I think I prefer this change. I didn't download a lot of the old packs as my Emulators folder is already just too tall to fit on one page. Meanwhile the various game categories are already over two pages tall each I think, so a few extra entries doesn't matter there so much.

I noticed on all of the games, on my TV out only unit, it doesn't seem to switch the screen over to the framebuffer ginge uses automatically, so I need to switch it with the euro key. I did find some games which didn't seem to launch properly, and on investigating their pndrun.out I discovered they all used the same filename, so it only retained logs for the last run. That one seemed to be complaining about GLIBC_2.4.lib missing or something, I think, but before that it had a mount error ('only root can do that'). I'll need to do some more testing to get to the bottom of this I think.

 

[alxm]

Hey Hooka, what would you say about having a single menu entry for each pack, instead of one for each game? Running a pack.pnd would start a menu from which you select individual games. The menu app could read a config file bundled with the PND that lists all the games with screenshots and a short description, and we could make it look nice and GP2X-themed. Would be happy to contribute something like this if you think it's a good way to go.

Thanks again for doing all this work to preserve our little scene

 

[Hooka]

I had been debating trying to make the packs mount to built-in in the menu, but didn't wanna butcher GINGE too badly if I can avoid it... but would that be a good solution alxm? then when I get gmenu2x going I could just have it do the same and have .ini's built-in...

levi: you on default firmware and the newest version? and which pack? any info or pm me the log and I'll try and fix it up for ya My tv-out cable falls apart for like no apparent reason, so I rarely use it (got my GP2X in cradle for such nonsense )

 

[_jr_]

In minimenu I just remapped all of them to custom categories, doesn't help with XFCE, though (it lumps them all into the 'other' category).

 

[alxm]

I had been debating trying to make the packs mount to built-in in the menu, but didn't wanna butcher GINGE too badly if I can avoid it... but would that be a good solution alxm? then when I get gmenu2x going I could just have it do the same and have .ini's built-in...

The menu launcher would be its own binary separate from GINGE, so we wouldn't have to butcher it at all This is all assuming that GINGE can be invoked with a config and GPE args, not sure if this is the case though - did you have to build custom GINGEs for each game?

Would be crazy to make a Gmenu2x-driven megapack with custom categories that has all the GP2X stuff that works. Talk about a killer app right there

 

[Hooka]

Would be crazy to make a Gmenu2x-driven megapack with custom categories that has all the GP2X stuff that works. Talk about a killer app right there

That was one of my ideas, just figured doing a megapack would give alot of bloat for the people who only wanted a handful of games... Not sure how many different pnd's can be mounted at the same time but I'm hoping I can make gmenu2x scan for the packs and automount them then parse the ini's and populate gmenu2x with everything people have in packs, but first things first... get gmenu2x up to snuff and integrated into GINGE THEN look at fixing up the Pandora specific port I have in progress to use as my main menu for Pandora because I definitely prefer it to minimenu (sorry skeezix, it's a nice menu but I find gmenu2x to be just superb!) and xfce for a quick pickup and play.

 

[canseco]

Input needed: I'm changing the way I pack the games, gonna make it so names are "Falldown - AlexM (GINGE)" and they show up under the games menu under puzzle, strategy, etc. if that works for everyone?

It works for me, as my emulator submenu is already a bit populated,

 

[Hooka]

K, have about 1/4 of the packs changed to being under game categories instead of emulators, will upload tomorrow when I finish.

that'll help for the time being and I'll get back on gmenu2x for ginge use cause that'll really help if I can just get that polished off.

Also threw up an Akuma no Houkon pack, gotta love that some of the old GP32 goodness is now on Pandora (thankfully ported to GP2X)

Edit: Updated and uploaded existing packs to repo, didn't change the demo one as I'm unsure as to where I would put it... Been working on updating the compatibility list to the best of my knowledge and putting notes for games that are on both systems or already ported to caanoo/pandora.

list of working games in GINGE now: 634 between GP2X and Wiz... Wiz support needs a little work but I'm quite impressed with those numbers seeing as I saw an old post stating ~300 gp2x worked and 50 wiz, so not too shabby!

Handful of stats: 57 items (might be doubles of some for gp2x/wiz) that are on Pandora already that can be ignored that don't work, 61 that are on Pandora that do work... of the 19 games that are on both wiz and gp2x but not on pandora only 2 that both versions won't work... 297 out of 945 that I tried that don't work and 12 games not on the list yet I found that will work.

 

[levi]

Demos on Pandora normally live in the Graphics sub-folder I think.

So I rebooted my Pandora the other day and retested stuff. The log file still contains the mount error, and a couple of sh errors about options --old and --wiz not being recognised, but everything I tried worked. I think I retried things that broke before, so it looks like some instability caused by long uptime killed it. That happens at random when I'm testing stuff, so it's nothing you did that broke it.

However, I do still need to switch the tv-out to the other framebuffer after I launch ginge apps, and back after I exit it. I don't really understand how software controls the tv-out framebuffer selection, and it seems to work independently to however it's done for the internal LCD, as I never had this problem testing stuff on my LCD before I broke the connection. So I'm not sure anyone can test it without some form of TV-out cable, but hopefully it's just a line or two of something that other devs know about, because it's been a while since I last had this problem testing other devs code.