NeoGeoX Hacking and Mods

Ukyo said:

hey rot; would you mind changing your banner link from this thread to the one in news & rumors?

it might help a little.

Click to expand...

I thought about the request.... and decided it's a no....

Ukyo pal... if the lads can't play ball... even tho i've told them very nicely.... then they'll find out the hard way...

However, I will change the banner... to reflect the new policy...

xROTx

NeoTurfMasta said:

Wow, lots of great progress since last night!

My only recommendation is that if you want to do the mod on the external SD card, just remove the internal jumpers and not do the teardown that Steward did on his page. Its much easier to do and it doesnt require you to remove the existing SD slot.

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Im sorry, can you clarify? Remove the jumper in side the micro sd card or reader? Or do you mean inside the x? If i can accesse my backups via the external sd on my 370 this is awesome news. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

Demitri1983 said:

Im sorry, can you clarify? Remove the jumper in side the micro sd card or reader? Or do you mean inside the x? If i can accesse my backups via the external sd on my 370 this is awesome news. Thanks for all the hard work guys.

Click to expand...

On the X. There are smd resistor jumpers in the path of every line on the SD card. When you pop one off, it cuts that signal to the X. So, you remove the smd jumpers at the data locations and put a wire from the SD slot to the pad where the jumper was. I dont have time right now to draw it up, but its very very easy and you'll only need to do 4 wires instead of 9. And you wont be destroying the SD slot.

EDIT: give me 5 minutes. I'll make a pic

Im totally new here.. But I'm glad I've joined..

why cant we modify a micro SD adapter so that we can put the SD adapter in the neogeox and modify the internal pins in the adapter so that we can use microSD's in the normal external port.

This make any sense? Edited pics so you dont need to remove the resistors. I dont want anyone removing something they cant put back later. Just lift the SD leg from the board and solder from the leg to either the smd resistor or the pad under the lifted pin. Easiest would be to solder to the pad under the lifted pin.

That's what I'm planning on doing tonight.

THD said:

Im totally new here.. But I'm glad I've joined..

why cant we modify a micro SD adapter so that we can put the SD adapter in the neogeox and modify the internal pins in the adapter so that we can use microSD's in the normal external port.

Click to expand...

THD said:

Im totally new here.. But I'm glad I've joined..

why cant we modify a micro SD adapter so that we can put the SD adapter in the neogeox and modify the internal pins in the adapter so that we can use microSD's in the normal external port.

Click to expand...

HitokiriRyu said:

That's what I'm planning on doing tonight.

Click to expand...

Good luck finding one with stable pins/pads after you open it. The 3 I have looked at recently are all held together by the case. So when you cut the case, and cut the lines, it may be hard to get it to stay in place after you rewire it.

rEdBuLl said:

@ack:
how did you do the kernel change for card init spoof, didn't this need a recompile of the kernel ?

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It required a kernel recompile. I have been messing the ingenic supplied kernel patch (ftp.ingenic.cn:/3sw/JZ4770/01LinuxBsp/20110729/source/linux-2.6.31.3-jz-20110809-FR1.patch.gz).

-ack

Thanks for the heads up NTM, I'll see what I can do.

NeoTurfMasta said:

Good luck finding one with stable pins/pads after you open it. The 3 I have looked at recently are all held together by the case. So when you cut the case, and cut the lines, it may be hard to get it to stay in place after you rewire it.

Click to expand...

Thanks Ntm. So remove the little jumper ball and connect wire accordingly. Thanks again. I may look into cracking a sd adapter open to see ehat i can come up with.

YOU GUYS TOTALLY ROCK !! KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK GENTLEMEN .. LOL CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG ??

Steward said:

sorry, if i cannot post this picture, please remove it.

after change the bit0-bit3 by using hardware method, now, it can play KOF97.

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So...thats pretty awesome, but you can play it 4:3, right?

If you guys are uncomfortable removing the resistor jumpers, just lift the pads of the SD slot. That is probably the best solution honestly. I'll update the pic.

Wow. I've registered probably 10 times and FINALLY got approved. I had so much to say, but fortunately most of it's been said by others.

I am a 370 owner who has no interest in opening the unit up. I am however very interested in replacing the games and more importantly unlimited continues. Being a horrible Neo Geo player, only having 3 continues makes playing level 1 over and over again no fun at all. Don't get me started on save states, but at least with unlimited continues I can enjoy the unit.

I opened up a couple MicroSD --> SD adapters. the PQI was a lot easier to mod than the Kingston. I just went to the store and bought 3 different brands of MicroSD cards that came with adapters. My ultimate goal is to keep the pin conversion in the MicroSD --> SD adapter. It's pretty tight but it might be doable.

Plan B, or a proof of concept would be opening up a MicroSD adapter and soldering wires to all the points that the MicroSD would connect to. These cases are easy enough to glue back together and the wires will fit out the hole where the MicroSD was supposed to slide in. From there, connect the wires to the modified points on another MicroSD adapter outside the unit. Having wires coming out of the console is not ideal, but I think it would work.

For those of us who want to open the console up, there are probably better ways.

If we can get a MicroSD --> SD adapter wired up correctly I think a lot of people will be very happy.

VERY nice work figuring out how to fit multiple games on 1 card. The 4Gb cards and adapters I'm buying were only $4, but it's more about having to swap in and out ETC.

Guys. VERY good work. I don't get the BS in this thread, but what I do get is that there are some great people working on this during what is a VERY busy time of year. Keep it up.

NEO G-TRON said:

YOU GUYS TOTALLY ROCK !! KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK GENTLEMEN .. LOL CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG ??

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People on neo-geo.com getting along? hahahaha! thats hilarious!

Hi everyone just registered, cannot make any threads yet but ahh well i look forward to my stay, glad i found this place too as i just got the neo geo X and once i was reading about the possible hacking going on i thought i gotta get this, i had bought the gp2x years back and thought that was ok but was underwhelmed, but its good to see progress being made i might take the plunge and open mine up too, as i got a speck on the screen thats annoying me like hell but then i cant be sure if its a dead pixel, keep at it guys

Wow ok, this thread is rather huge.

I'm just a timid neo newbie lurker who sees warnings at every page of this thread, I also see derailments of some sorts, then coming back to topic, then suggestions photos, books-worth of lines of code, this is all too overwhelming for me.

Not holding my breath for this, but could one or two people just get together this afternoon or tonight to sum up everything we've accomplished so far and how to do it in a single post? I believe this would be incredibly useful to everyone over the internet, including veterans who will know at which directions they should plan on going to hack the system, or mods who like xROTx who want to follow what's going on, or newbies like me wanting to know how far we've come. For example, differences between 337 and 370 versions, what you can do with or without opening the console, or soldering stuff, etc. I would if I could, but, in all honesty, I cannot understand anything that's related to SD-cards, USB drivers, coding and Linux.

PS... since when is this supposed to be a debate thread over the NGX??
pce

Why not using the official NeoGeo.com wiki at http://www.neo-geo.com/wiki
I have some trouble when i try to save changes, but maybe i do not have enough permissions yet...

MarioNintendo said:

PS... since when is this supposed to be a debate thread over the NGX??
pce

Click to expand...

That is exactly what I was thinking.
Hi, I just registered.

This thread should NOT be a thread about arguing weather or not the NGX is a piece of shit or not, it should be just about hacking and modding it. I don't know why that banner at the top seems to insist it's a "debate" thread. The debating should go in it's own thread and we can keep on discussing modding without distractions.

Thanks, Rot. I was getting really tired of reading NGX bashing in a thread clearly titled "NeoGeoX Hacking and Mods".

MarioNintendo said:

Not holding my breath for this, but could one or two people just get together this afternoon or tonight to sum up everything we've accomplished so far and how to do it in a single post?

Click to expand...

That would be good. Though, wouldn't it be even better if we used the wiki?

I did not even know there was a wiki. Sure, that would do the job as well, as long as it's all in one place with (if possible) dumbproof explanations

So based on the instructions for doing a firmware recovery on the rzx-50 I have been able to do the same with an empty internal sd card in my ngx.

The summary of how to do it is the following, and this only works on 32bit winxp or 32bit win7.

- download and decompress ftp://ftp.ingenic.cn:/3sw/JZ4770/01LinuxBsp/20110729/burn/usb_boot_burn-jz4770-20111025.rar
- open device manager in windows (makes it easier to see when the device is detected)
- with the ngx powered off, press and hold the start button and plug into your computer
- this will cause an unknown JZ4770 boot device to show up in device manager
- manually install the drivers that are from the rar
- unplug the ngx
- start USBbootTool.exe
- with the ngx powered off, press and hold the start button and plug into your computer

If you want to just do a full recovery, just pick your full internal sd image backup file for uboot.bin then click the checkbox to the left of uboot.bin. This should write it out to the internal sd card of the ngx, progress bar is at the bottom.

The USBbootTool.exe supports being able to write different files to different offsets within the internal sd card, these can be adjusted in tool_cfg/LinuxFileCfg.ini. The default one that you see when you start the tool is


The StartPage value * 512 represents where the file will be written to the internal sd card. So you can define your own offsets for where a specific file should be written, and not have to write out an entire image each time.

The full image replacement works with uboot.bin because its starting point is 0.

-ack

Also, after compiling all the currently available info some edits to the OP may be in order.

I have some errands to run and a party to prepare for, but after that shit's done, I can start compiling info if no one else steps up.

ack said:

So based on the instructions for doing a firmware recovery on the rzx-50 I have been able to do the same with an empty internal sd card in my ngx.

The summary of how to do it is the following, and this only works on 32bit winxp or 32bit win7.

- download and decompress ftp://ftp.ingenic.cn:/3sw/JZ4770/01LinuxBsp/20110729/burn/usb_boot_burn-jz4770-20111025.rar
- open device manager in windows (makes it easier to see when the device is detected)
- with the ngx powered off, press and hold the start button and plug into your computer
- this will cause an unknown JZ4770 boot device to show up in device manager
- manually install the drivers that are from the rar
- unplug the ngx
- start USBbootTool.exe
- with the ngx powered off, press and hold the start button and plug into your computer

If you want to just do a full recovery, just pick your full internal sd image backup file for uboot.bin then click the checkbox to the left of uboot.bin. This should write it out to the internal sd card of the ngx, progress bar is at the bottom.

The USBbootTool.exe supports being able to write different files to different offsets within the internal sd card, these can be adjusted in tool_cfg/LinuxFileCfg.ini. The default one that you see when you start the tool is

Code:

[File1]
FileName=uboot.bin				
StartPage=0
NandOption=2

[File2]
FileName=uImage 				
StartPage=8192
NandOption=2

[File3]
FileName=filesystem
StartPage=24576
NandOption=2

The StartPage value * 512 represents where the file will be written to the internal sd card. So you can define your own offsets for where a specific file should be written, and not have to write out an entire image each time.

The full image replacement works with uboot.bin because its starting point is 0.

-ack

Click to expand...

You rule ack! I'll give that a shot today. Thanks!