Neo Geo CD Conversion Project.

pixeljunkie

Whilst Drunk., I Found God., Booze = Bad.,
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i want to see video/screenshots of this working
 

CADMAN2K

Kabuki Klasher
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Getting to work on a CDZ

I guess that they will work on a CDZ, I think you just need to get round the CDZ's protection that kicks in when trying to play copied games.
That would be the only reason I would think where incompatabilty was an Issue.
 

Fakk2

Crossed Swords 2 Bootleg Artist.,
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Its to bad, out of the 4 games Cdoty did conversions for, only 1 of them seems to work on my CDZ unit. and that is Andro Dunos and the colors are severly messed up. :P
 

Neo Alec

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CDoty's work fine for me on the regular CD.

I tried doing some of these today, for games I own on MVS, and didn't get anything to boot quite properly. I don't understand some of the directions. I looked at the site you got it from, and it seems it's written for hardcore emulator people who will stop at nothing to force the game to work. Like, where it says to merge the files, how do I do that? How do I cut down files to make them fit without corrupting them entirely? And the sprites section of the instructions I don't understand at all.
 

werejag

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simple dos command

copy /b file1+file2+files3 outputfile

for copying files together
 

kuk

Benimaru's Hairdresser
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Hello

the programmer Kanyero work for the Conversion MVS to AES, it's an good way, i beta test 9 Games with succes, i think when all are ok he will do an annonce
 

Murray

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Sly DC said:
2. Swap two sets of bytes at address 0x66 and 0x6A of the program
Could you elaborate a little on this? Does this mean open the rom in a hex editor and swap the two bytes starting at 0x66 with the two bytes starting at 0x6A?

Also, copy /b won't work for merging the C roms since they need to be interleaved. If I get some spare time at work today, I can probably throw something together to do that since I don't know of anything preexisting that will.

Byteswapping was easy enough because there's a tool on Eidolon's Inn that will do that.

Using an oversized Z80 rom may take some experimenting (and probably luck). For a 128K file, do you just truncate it at 64K or use only every second byte or what?
 

JMKurtz

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Well, that's easy enough to do...


CADMAN2K said:
I guess that they will work on a CDZ, I think you just need to get round the CDZ's protection that kicks in when trying to play copied games.
That would be the only reason I would think where incompatabilty was an Issue.
 

JMKurtz

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The homebrew dev kit that is on my site (www.neobitz.com) has a utility I wrote for doing all sorts of byte swapping, splitting, etc...

I've pulled the utility out for you -- you can download it here:

http://www.neobitz.com/downloads/romwak.zip

Of course, you can download the entire dev kit and write a game while you're at it :)

Jeff

Murray said:
Could you elaborate a little on this? Does this mean open the rom in a hex editor and swap the two bytes starting at 0x66 with the two bytes starting at 0x6A?

Also, copy /b won't work for merging the C roms since they need to be interleaved. If I get some spare time at work today, I can probably throw something together to do that since I don't know of anything preexisting that will.

Byteswapping was easy enough because there's a tool on Eidolon's Inn that will do that.

Using an oversized Z80 rom may take some experimenting (and probably luck). For a 128K file, do you just truncate it at 64K or use only every second byte or what?
 

Neo Alec

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Thank you. Good information posted here. I could combine the files on DOS, but I noticed that CDoty's Puzzle de Pon actually keeps the two in separate files and then calls them both in the boot file. I tried doing that with my own, and it didn't work at all. But CDoty's works.

How do you do this part?

Sly DC said:
Sprites (C):

1. Read two bytes from your C1
2. Byteswap the bytes from part 1
3. Read two bytes from your C2
4. Byteswap the bytes from part 3
5. Repeat steps 1-4 until your new rom is 4 Megabytes in size
A. Your output file may be smaller if your roms are tiny
6. Save the ouput file as spr.spr (Can be different)


Also, how do you cut down 128k file to a 64k file without ruining it?


I tried changing the E0 part at byte 63 in CDoty's to 32, and it didn't do a damn thing to the game when I burned and booted it. Does that thing really do anything? Because I don't understand what is meant by AES or MVS/CD version.
 

Murray

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JMKurtz said:
The homebrew dev kit that is on my site (www.neobitz.com) has a utility I wrote for doing all sorts of byte swapping, splitting, etc...

Of course, you can download the entire dev kit and write a game while you're at it :)
Well that's all kinds of useful. Definitely got the whole kit. :)

Edit for Neo Alec: It looks like the romwak utility JMKurtz posted will do the C rom combining. The "byte merge" option, if I understand right.
 

Neo Alec

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Thank you for the utility. I will definitely check it out.
 

Sly DC

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Hi all,

For those who want the tools that i took tomake the porting of MVS games,
here's the link of the page of iq_132 tools and his informations about his tools:

http://neosource.1emulation.com/forums/index.php?topic=371.msg3114#msg3114

But the GFXCNV.EXE has a bug, it's been reported to iq_132 has he will release
a fix version for his GFXCNV.EXE. In the meantime, i'm using the NG to NGCD.exe
tool from SpekSNK (www.speksnk.es), which works great.

@ JMKurtz: Hi! Hope you don't mind that i did ports of Columns and Poker Night
for playing themon a real Neo-Geo CD system. If you want the ISO's, let me
know. I'll be glad to give them to you! :)


--- Sly DC ---
 

Neo Alec

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Sly DC said:
For those who want the tools that i took tomake the porting of MVS games,
here's the link of the page of iq_132 tools and his informations about his tools:

http://neosource.1emulation.com/forums/index.php?topic=371.msg3114#msg3114
Got them already, and they seemed to be useless to me. Looked like they were more for making it work on an emulator. There's a tool in there that claims to make a CD of Pochi & Nyaa. Furthermore, they didn't seem to run on my Windows XP.
 

Murray

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Neo Alec said:
Got them already, and they seemed to be useless to me. Looked like they were more for making it work on an emulator. There's a tool in there that claims to make a CD of Pochi & Nyaa. Furthermore, they didn't seem to run on my Windows XP.
I just used them to generate files for Puzzle De Pon R and it works fine in an emulator. Using those tools generated a slightly different prg.prg than following the instructions (I'm sure I just misunderstood them) and a completely different spr.spr than romwak did (word merge instead of byte merge, I guess).

I'll give it a shot on real hardware tonight.

Edit: I'm using XP and the tools worked fine for me. They are command line only, though.
 

Neo Alec

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Murray said:
I just used them to generate files for Puzzle De Pon R and it works fine in an emulator. Using those tools generated a slightly different prg.prg than following the instructions (I'm sure I just misunderstood them) and a completely different spr.spr than romwak did (word merge instead of byte merge, I guess).

I'll give it a shot on real hardware tonight.

Edit: I'm using XP and the tools worked fine for me. They are command line only, though.
When I try to run the exe it just says command not recognized and closes.
 

JMKurtz

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Nah, I don't mind at all since they are the public/free versions.

Jeff

Sly DC said:
Hi all,

For those who want the tools that i took tomake the porting of MVS games,
here's the link of the page of iq_132 tools and his informations about his tools:

http://neosource.1emulation.com/forums/index.php?topic=371.msg3114#msg3114

But the GFXCNV.EXE has a bug, it's been reported to iq_132 has he will release
a fix version for his GFXCNV.EXE. In the meantime, i'm using the NG to NGCD.exe
tool from SpekSNK (www.speksnk.es), which works great.

@ JMKurtz: Hi! Hope you don't mind that i did ports of Columns and Poker Night
for playing themon a real Neo-Geo CD system. If you want the ISO's, let me
know. I'll be glad to give them to you! :)


--- Sly DC ---
 

Fakk2

Crossed Swords 2 Bootleg Artist.,
Joined
Mar 8, 2004
Posts
1,548
well, when you guys get some games working on the CDZ please let me know so I can grab them and play them on my CDZ console.

I would really like to see Pochi and Nyaa on NeoGeoCD. :)
 

Sly DC

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Hi Again All! :)

@JMKurtz: Cool! So i have you blessing to post the ISO's "Columns" and "Poker Night". I"ll gather up a small Neo page on my web site with you two game, tools, the how-to...etc..etc... so that people can make their own ports and also play your two games on their real CD system. :) :) :)

@Fakk2: JMKurtz told me about the CDZ boot protection found in the IPL.TXT. Before replying to his PM, i took a look with a Hex Editor and seems that the protection is not included. Since i don't have a CDZ, i can't garantee that it will work on a real CDZ. So onced the two games posted on my web page, would you try to burn one of them and test it out ?

@Neo Alec: Weird...because for porting the MVS roms, i'm using WinXP but you have to open-up a command prompt (click on Start, All programs, Accessories, and click on the Command Prompt), after which you'll have a DOS prompt windowed and be able to put the command lines.

@For everyone who wants to make their own ports: the GFXCNV.EXE tool has a bug in it, me and KaNyEro reported it to iq_132 and the fixed version hasn't been uploaded yet. I'll put the NG to NGCD.exe tool (for swapping the C1/C2 files to SPR) on my web page. The tool is in spanish but it's very, very easy to use.

So keep an eye out for my Neo-Geo web page on how to port MVS roms to a real NGCD system. Onced finished the page, i'll post the URL.

Take care everybody! :)

--- Sly DC ---
 

Fakk2

Crossed Swords 2 Bootleg Artist.,
Joined
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Posts
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Sly DC said:
Hi Again All! :)

@JMKurtz: Cool! So i have you blessing to post the ISO's "Columns" and "Poker Night". I"ll gather up a small Neo page on my web site with you two game, tools, the how-to...etc..etc... so that people can make their own ports and also play your two games on their real CD system. :) :) :)

@Fakk2: JMKurtz told me about the CDZ boot protection found in the IPL.TXT. Before replying to his PM, i took a look with a Hex Editor and seems that the protection is not included. Since i don't have a CDZ, i can't garantee that it will work on a real CDZ. So onced the two games posted on my web page, would you try to burn one of them and test it out ?

@Neo Alec: Weird...because for porting the MVS roms, i'm using WinXP but you have to open-up a command prompt (click on Start, All programs, Accessories, and click on the Command Prompt), after which you'll have a DOS prompt windowed and be able to put the command lines.

@For everyone who wants to make their own ports: the GFXCNV.EXE tool has a bug in it, me and KaNyEro reported it to iq_132 and the fixed version hasn't been uploaded yet. I'll put the NG to NGCD.exe tool (for swapping the C1/C2 files to SPR) on my web page. The tool is in spanish but it's very, very easy to use.

So keep an eye out for my Neo-Geo web page on how to port MVS roms to a real NGCD system. Onced finished the page, i'll post the URL.

Take care everybody! :)

--- Sly DC ---



just PM me your URL to your webpage and I can test out your games no problem when you are ready. :)
 

werejag

Galford's Poppy Trainer
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how about a proof of concept kit.

a tutorial if you will, with a rom downloadable to a working cd

all tools and guidence

use a homebrew rom so we are legal
 

Sly DC

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Fakk2 said:
just PM me your URL to your webpage and I can test out your games no problem when you are ready. :)

No problem. As soon it is finished, i'll PM you. And thanks in advanced to test
out the games. :)

As for Pochi and Nyaa on NeoGeoCD, didn't tried to port it since it's quite big.
See here why:

Z80: 512k (max is 64k)
PCM: 04m (max is 01meg)
FIX: 128k (no problem here)
SPR: 16m (max is 04meg)
PRG: 512k (no problem)

So the Z80, PCM and SPR files have to be cut down, which can mean that the game can be quite unplayable. Especially the SPR since we can use only 25%
(04 megs of 16megs) which can imply characters, sprites,background not displayed.

The only way to be able to make the game work would be to cut the 3 big files
into smaller chunks and disassemble the PRG and change the pointers to each small chunks, which i can't do it since i don't have any 68K programming knowledge.

Is someone here a brainy on 68K programming ? And also, is there a 68K disassembler to use under windows ? Or have a scanned of the official programming book ?

So much questions...sigh! (going :loco: here...LOL!!)

--- Sly DC ---
 

Sly DC

n00b
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werejag said:
how about a proof of concept kit.

a tutorial if you will, with a rom downloadable to a working cd

all tools and guidence

use a homebrew rom so we are legal


Humm...quite a great idea you have there werejag.

Ok, give me some time to make the web page with screenshots and all.

--- Sly DC ---
 
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