NeoGeoX Hacking and Mods

N

nerdstick

Crossed Swords Squire
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Oct 1, 2012
Posts
183
topher said:
What is the OS requirements for the program? Looks like Linux or OSX. If that's the case, I'm hosed till I upgrade some home computers...I'm still running 10.4 on the Mac and haven't had a Linux box since RedHat had their IPO and Loki was still alive...last distro I used was the commercial ver of Suse around that same time frame...ah, the memories and the frustrations...
Click to expand...

A380? Windows, although you'd need to use Linux to access the X's SD.
 
GohanX

GohanX

Horrible Goose
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Do you need an actual Linux installation or would a Live CD or Damn Small Linux on a USB drive work?
 
H

hatch

n00b
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Feb 8, 2002
Posts
15
mr_e said:
Code: 
tty3::respawn:/sbin/getty -8 38400 tty3
Click to expand...

Hi Guys,

And sorry for the late reply. No luck in evoking a shell, I assume all keypresses are caught by the snk desktop app. I will now move on to swapping around the .dges to see if I can come up with something more useful.

Btw., big thanks to the guys passing over the ftp details. I have successfully recovered my NGX with the images from it.

Martin

PS.: Just realized that, acc. to my join date, I've been lurking this place silently for more than 10 years - good to see that I can now finally be of use ;)
 
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T

trustMe

Kuroko's Training Dummy
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F

FA-MAS

Kula's Candy
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ack said:
Hi

I did some poking of the sys_update_file and made a little util to extract the contents.
Click to expand...

Here's a link to a script that can be used to extract vmlinuz.bin from the kernel1 and kernel2 uImages. I have no idea what it could be used for. But maybe it'll be useful.

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/How_to_Extract_an_uImage

Got it extracted to the base kernel, tried a few tools to try and get the config from them. But it looks like they were complied without the option to embed the config into them. Anyone know of another way?
 
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M

mosaic

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Feb 8, 2004
Posts
33
Pardon me for unlurking, but is the general concensus here that a solution for all units would consist of a hardware mod to allow booting from the SD Card slot... combined with a hacked boot image?

I appear to have a 370 unit and would really, really, really like to see unibios support...
 
GohanX

GohanX

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You don't need the hardware mod, Turf just did it so that he wouldn't have to take the unit apart every time he wanted to try something.
 
GohanX

GohanX

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I stand corrected, I forgot about the 370's soldered memory chip.
 
Demitri1983

Demitri1983

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So as of right now there is no way of accessing the system memory via usb on 370? If there was access would we be able to change any system info on the hard chip?
 
lastcallhall

lastcallhall

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GohanX said:
I stand corrected, I forgot about the 370's soldered memory chip.
Click to expand...

There may be a workaround for that if we can find a way to launch a rom or romset from the external SD card using the UniBIOS wrapped around the rom instead of the one the NGX uses. I'm working on that now using a Fedora 17 box. If I can do that, then I don't even need access to the internal RAM, I'll just boot em all off of SD...
 
NeoTurfMasta

NeoTurfMasta

DANCE DANCE KARNOV!,
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Anyone have a pic of the 370 chip yet? I can do a write up on disabling it and attaching a new sd slot for those who want to do that.
 
G

geodude

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Dec 23, 2012
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NeoTurfMasta said:
Anyone have a pic of the 370 chip yet? I can do a write up on disabling it and attaching a new sd slot for those who want to do that.
Click to expand...

The only camara on me doesn't take very good close up pics, but I did what I could...

YIumD.jpg

ktvXt.jpg
 
O

Ozfer

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Dec 25, 2012
Posts
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Yeay I can finally speak. I have been watching this thread for days because no one was activating my new account. I have a 337 model neo geo x. Anyways I have tested the game sd card in many different file systems and none of them are able to mount it. I have tried it on mac windows and linux file systems. I have also even made a img of the card and put it on another sd card I have and it wont work. None of the hex editors, or data recovery tools I have used could find anything intelligent on the drive. Whatever they are doing it is very secure so far. I tried opening my neo geo x and couldn't get the board off the screen part, am I missing something? Also when I put it back together I almost lost a spring that went flying across the room D: for some strange reason my neo geo has been missing a left side screw ever since I got it idk where it went. I also have a non sdhc micro sd 2gb card that I could test out and make a backup img of the internal card if I can get the board out. I wonder what is preventing us from using other sd cards in the game slot. On the 370 model you should be able to un-solder the memory chip and use the previously mentioned pin-out guide to wire the points to the sd card slot, then use a img someone uploads of the internal sd card, write it to a sd and use that to access system files. So from my understanding the internal sd card has no file protection on it? This seems like it could be easy to change out the system files to something we want then. There is a picture floating around somewhere of the 370s chip let me try to find it. I do not believe the neo geo x has already been so easily hacked as many people would love to believe. I think this due to the fact that we have 0 hacks for any of the new versions of the console yet and even with the old versions all you can do is replace a rom with one of a smaller size or use the unibios and even this requires opening the unit every time, something not easily done for everyone. We still don't have our custom software running on it and we cant play games off the sd slot yet. The only chip memory you can access on the 370 model so far is the 1Gb fat partition via a usb cable to the console. I also looked through the update file with a hex editor and found some interesting things about it and using some other open source software it probably shouldn't be using...
 
Rot

Rot

Calvin & Hobbes, ,
Joined
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Posts
11,441
Ozfer said:
Yeay I can finally speak. I have been watching this thread for days because no one was activating my new account. I have a 337 model neo geo x. Anyways I have tested the game sd card in many different file systems and none of them are able to mount it. I have tried it on mac windows and linux file systems. I have also even made a img of the card and put it on another sd card I have and it wont work. None of the hex editors, or data recovery tools I have used could find anything intelligent on the drive. Whatever they are doing it is very secure so far. I tried opening my neo geo x and couldn't get the board off the screen part, am I missing something? Also when I put it back together I almost lost a spring that went flying across the room D: for some strange reason my neo geo has been missing a left side screw ever since I got it idk where it went. I also have a non sdhc micro sd 2gb card that I could test out and make a backup img of the internal card if I can get the board out. I wonder what is preventing us from using other sd cards in the game slot. On the 370 model you should be able to un-solder the memory chip and use the previously mentioned pin-out guide to wire the points to the sd card slot, then use a img someone uploads of the internal sd card, write it to a sd and use that to access system files. So from my understanding the internal sd card has no file protection on it? This seems like it could be easy to change out the system files to something we want then. There is a picture floating around somewhere of the 370s chip let me try to find it. I do not believe the neo geo x has already been so easily hacked as many people would love to believe. I think this due to the fact that we have 0 hacks for any of the new versions of the console yet and even with the old versions all you can do is replace a rom with one of a smaller size or use the unibios and even this requires opening the unit every time, something not easily done for everyone. We still don't have our custom software running on it and we cant play games off the sd slot yet. The only chip memory you can access on the 370 model so far is the 1Gb fat partition via a usb cable to the console. I also looked through the update file with a hex editor and found some interesting things about it and using some other open source software it probably shouldn't be using...
Click to expand...

Hi Ofzer pal...

Sorry... I've been a bit busy.... I activated you earlier this evening...

Anyway, Thanks for the contribution...

However, it's be nice to have some punctutaion... walls of text makes my head hurt (unless you're typing from a mobile phone...)

xROTx
 
Ukyo

Ukyo

,
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Ozfer said:
I tried opening my neo geo x and couldn't get the board off the screen part, am I missing something?
Click to expand...

same here; looks like there are 4-6 additional screws [plus something else?] on the board preventing separation from the front of the shell.

anyone want to post a how-to video?
 
douglie007

douglie007

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topher said:
For those that have pulled their units apart, is there enough room in the unit to replace the thumbstick with one from a NGPC?
Click to expand...

would you really want to messup a good system for the X.. I guess if you have a broken one around maybe.
 
douglie007

douglie007

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27
ack said:
Hi


Here is what shows up in dmesg when you insert ninja masters sd card
Code: 
key_open
Card Insert
Card Eject
Card Insert
mmc1: new high speed SD card at address 0001
mmcblk1: mmc1:0001  63.0 MiB 
 mmcblk1: p1
mmcblk1: p1 size 129145 exceeds device capacity, limited to end of disk

The card gets mounted here and contains the following files
Code: 
/dev/mmcblk1p1           64544     43856     20688  68% /mnt/mmc

/mnt/mmc
/mnt/mmc/card_game
/mnt/mmc/card_game/game1.png
/mnt/mmc/card_game/game1.fba
/mnt/mmc/card_game/game_card_configure.conf

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root     4096 Nov  1  2010 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root     4096 Nov  1  2010 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 44770560 Nov  1  2010 game1.fba
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    87272 Nov  1  2010 game1.png
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       61 Nov  1  2010 game_card_configure.conf

$ cat game_card_configure.conf 
card_game_work_path=/mnt/mmc/card_game/
card_game_number=1


-ack
Click to expand...

so do we know whats in the conf file? is it pointing to the info on the card to tell it the game that is inserted or is it just info on screen size?... Ive had no luck on DD working on my card I dont know what Ive done wrong.
 
N

nerdstick

Crossed Swords Squire
Joined
Oct 1, 2012
Posts
183
Ukyo said:
same here; looks like there are 4-6 additional screws [plus something else?] on the board preventing separation from the front of the shell.

anyone want to post a how-to video?
Click to expand...

There are two screws on the left side, the miniboard (which must be separated by popping off the joystick from the front), and two screws underneath the miniboard. Once those are all out, you need to pop the ports out from the plastic shell. I personally put the screwdriver underneath the board and gently push upwards while pulling port plastic away, once for each port to pop them out. Once that's done it's free.
 
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