OSX flashcart tool with a GUI.. beta 1

[markwolfe]

Ok so from what I am reading here, the trouble I am having with USA roms is a known problem. I do not recall seeing this listed in the sale info for the card. Can someone point me to where the NEO team reports that USA roms won't work? I have an american Turbo Duo and I have tried many things to try to get usa roms to work to no avail.

seems to me this should have been specified up front as I was buying it. Is there a work around? have patched roms been posted somewhere?

[goldenegg]

Ok so from what I am reading here, the trouble I am having with USA roms is a known problem. I do not recall seeing this listed in the sale info for the card. Can someone point me to where the NEO team reports that USA roms won't work? I have an american Turbo Duo and I have tried many things to try to get usa roms to work to no avail.

seems to me this should have been specified up front as I was buying it. Is there a work around? have patched roms been posted somewhere?

Whoa there.  Calm down for a second.

This OSX flash tool is not an official NEO product.  It is released by someone who created their own OSX solution.

Flashing USA roms on that cart for use in American systems works perfectly with the Windows based NEO software.  I can confirm this as I'm done it myself.  If you want to use this OSX utility, you'll need to wait until proper support of USA ROMs, but remember that it's being created by a guy in his spare time.

[mr.spiv]

Any luck automating the process to make USA roms work on a PC-E?

I could add a feature that patches a rom on fly if the flash utility finds a "typical" code sequence checking for region.. That would not be 100% but could probably be made to work with known US roms. Would that be enough?

[goldenegg]

I could add a feature that patches a rom on fly if the flash utility finds a "typical" code sequence checking for region.. That would not be 100% but could probably be made to work with known US roms. Would that be enough?

Ya, I'm fairly certain that would be sufficient.  The patching option should be easily disabled through the interface, just incase it starts messing with ROMs it shouldn't.

[HyperJunkie]

hey thanks for making a turbografx tool for this flash cart!

The windows software is awful, especially without windows 7 or x64 support. 

I am testing your software on a macbook pro running snow leopard and everything worked fine, except when I went to boot the flash cart on my Turbografx-16 the menu came up as it should, but none of the roms would boot.

They are all USA roms that I got from www.emuparadise.org and I formatted the card for a Turbografx-16.

Thanks for any help you could give me.  I want to use your software so I don't have to deal with the terrible windows software.

[mr.spiv]

Thanks for testing. All input is important. Unfortunately I have been put off from this project for a while due to enormous pressure at work. I will return working on this project as soon as my schedules permit. There are few nasty bugs to fix in addition to this proper USA rom support... shouldn't really be much but.. 

hey thanks for making a turbografx tool for this flash cart!

The windows software is awful, especially without windows 7 or x64 support. 

I am testing your software on a macbook pro running snow leopard and everything worked fine, except when I went to boot the flash cart on my Turbografx-16 the menu came up as it should, but none of the roms would boot.

They are all USA roms that I got from www.emuparadise.org and I formatted the card for a Turbografx-16.

Thanks for any help you could give me.  I want to use your software so I don't have to deal with the terrible windows software.

[Dr.neo]

The windows software is awful, especially without windows 7 or x64 support. 

the new neo2 pro menu haev embed the PC-E support already, support win7, will release soon.

[mr.spiv]

Right, I have finally found the bug that haunted me for quite some time (made USB very unstable). Hopefully I manage to complete the main code next week and then also finally fix the TGE support. Once there, I'll release the code so that the better coders out there can fix and tweak the rest of the remaining stuff...

Thanks for testing. All input is important. Unfortunately I have been put off from this project for a while due to enormous pressure at work. I will return working on this project as soon as my schedules permit. There are few nasty bugs to fix in addition to this proper USA rom support... shouldn't really be much but.. 

[Dr.neo]

it's great news! 

[mr.spiv]

If you want to beta test the latest OSX flashtool, drop me a message. USA roms are now auto detected and patched on fly. I am particularly interested in folks with TG-16 system..

Right, I have finally found the bug that haunted me for quite some time (made USB very unstable). Hopefully I manage to complete the main code next week and then also finally fix the TGE support. Once there, I'll release the code so that the better coders out there can fix and tweak the rest of the remaining stuff...

[goldenegg]

If no one comes forward with a TG-16 for testing, I'll be able to test with one at the beginning of Oct.  I know it's a while away, but better than nothing 

[mr.spiv]

Thanks. I'll put the stuff out soon so everyone can have a  test run. In a meantime I added a full localization support. As an example I'll provide the Finnish localization file in the application bundle.

If no one comes forward with a TG-16 for testing, I'll be able to test with one at the beginning of Oct.  I know it's a while away, but better than nothing 

[mr.spiv]

Another and hopefully final beta (v0.3) of the Slim-e-loader for testing. Download the .dmg http://deadcoderssociety.net/pce/dl/slimegui_beta_v0.3.dmg. Few release notes below:

• Detects USA roms and tries to patch them to "region free".
• English and Finnish locales included.
• Improved USB code, which should now handle "cancel" and errors better.
• Partly tested TG-16 support.
• Supports 64M and 128M carts but not the recent save RAM feature.
• The build-in menu is still the good old v1.03 (c) neoflash.
• Requires 32/64 bit Intel Mac with OSX 10.5 or better.

Note that the PCE/TG-16 switch defines the target machine type where the flash cart is going to be used. The switch does not have anything to do with the JAP or USA roms. So, for e.g. CoreGrafx select "PCE" and for TurboGrafx-16 select "TG16". The USA rom detection algorithm is rather trivial and can currently only find & patch one type of region detection code. So far that has worked for all of my USA roms.

A screen shot below:



I have tested v0.3 in my 64-bit IMac and MBP, and 32-bit MBP all running OSX 10.6.x. I also tested against 64M and 128M carts I have. Unfortunately, I only have CoreGrafx.. Needless to say, this works for me and if it fails for you, your loss..

The source code will be released once I get a good idea how to package everything.. The code is supposed to be portable (GUI and USB use cross platform open source libraries).

[HyperJunkie]

I had to exchange my flash cart because it was broken.  It has been almost a month, but ic2005 said they sent it out today.  Once I get the cart (hopefully sometime next week) I will test this for my USA turbografx 16 and let you know how it goes.

on a side note for Dr. Neo, ic2005 is a horrible site with terrible customer service.  I have no idea why you let them handle your flash carts, and why they are the only ones who sell the pc-engine cart.  I had to wait at least 3 or 4 days for a reply from them every time I had a question, and as I stated, this exchange has taken about a month so far!  I would look into other ways of distributing my products if I were you.  Why not open a store on Amazon.com or even ebay.com that you can manage yourself?

[mr.spiv]

Thanks. Any help is appreciated.

I had to exchange my flash cart because it was broken.  It has been almost a month, but ic2005 said they sent it out today.  Once I get the cart (hopefully sometime next week) I will test this for my USA turbografx 16 and let you know how it goes.

on a side note for Dr. Neo, ic2005 is a horrible site with terrible customer service.  I have no idea why you let them handle your flash carts, and why they are the only ones who sell the pc-engine cart.  I had to wait at least 3 or 4 days for a reply from them every time I had a question, and as I stated, this exchange has taken about a month so far!  I would look into other ways of distributing my products if I were you.  Why not open a store on Amazon.com or even ebay.com that you can manage yourself?